Harold Bloom Quotes

On the central motivation for loving, Freud is grimly original: the spirit withers too gloriously in the air of solitude, and the over­filled inner self threatens to choke on the excess of its own delights.

[The God of Paradise Lost] is self-righteous, irascible, and anx­ious: William Blake accurately termed him a Schoolmaster of Souls. You have to be a dogmatic Christian whose values are not aesthetic to find this God attractive.

Shelley and Keats did not survive to write the great epics of their maturity, and Wordsworth decayed into the celebrator of the Urzenic labyrinths of moral virtue who so disfigures The Excursion. Of the great Romantics only Blake kept his full powers into a magnificent maturity.

Stephen King is beneath the notice of any serious reader who has experienced Proust, Joyce, Henry James, Faulkner and all the other masters of the novel.

[Blake and Shelley] imbued me in childhood with their apocalyptic humanism. No matter that Blake considered himself a Christian and Shelley thought himself an atheist; both believed in what Blake called “the human form divine” and Shelley termed “shapes too bright to see.”

The real enemy of reading is the internet, a great gray amorphous mass in which everything will finally be equal to everything else.

Passionate sincerity, like ideological correctness, is not in itself a literary virtue.

For [Geoffrey] Hill, the natural world is, at best, “a stunned repose,” a judgment that allies him to Blake rather than to Wordsworth, Shelley rather than to Keats.

There are no bad poems in [Geoffrey] Hill’s [first] three books, and so much is demanded of the reader, in concentration and in the dignity of a desperate humanism, that more productive poets are likely to seem too indulgent, by comparison.

Freud, like one strain in Pre-Socratic thought, is telling us that a person’s character is his fate. Emerson, like quite another strain in the Pre-Socratics, a shamanistic one, is telling us—as Yeats did—that the daemon is our destiny.

They will surge up and we may be overcome; our universities are already travesties, and our journalists parody our professors of "cultural studies." For just a little while longer, we hold the heights, the realm of the aesthetic.

Culturally, we are at Thermopylae: the multiculturalists, the hordes of camp-followers afflicted by the French diseases, the mock-feminists, the commissars, the gender-and-power freaks, the hosts of new historicists and old materialists—all stand below us.

D. H. Lawrence was a Protestant apocalyptic, as religious as Blake, but also a personal myth maker like Blake. If the churches are Christian, then Blake and Lawrence are not, though they are altogether religious in their visions.

The socialist, mythological prose romances of William Morris, with their curiously effective blending of Pre-Raphaelite sensibility and Nonconformist radicalism, seem more archaic now than [George] MacDonald’s fascinatingly unhealthy mixture of Neo-Christianity and sadomasochism.

@HenryEOliver Essay on fantasy in Agon

Any true hero or heroine of literary fantasy discovers at last that the only fire they can steal is already and originally their own fire.

Borges, the modem fantasist with the most critical insight into the genre, charmingly regarded both onto-theology and speculative metaphysics as being forms of fantastic literature.

Prose fantasy, as the belated form of romance, tends to feature a dialectical alternation of Promethean and narcissistic tendencies in our nature; [Lewis] Carroll playfully exploits both, while gliding over the destructive elements in each.

There is a sense in which imaginative literature is perspectivism, so that the reader is likely to be overwhelmed by the work's difficulty unless its multiple perspectives are mastered.

an aim; our natural defenses properly are aroused, and we resent so palpable a design upon us. It is Lindsay’s astonishing achievement that, like Blake, he can persuade many attentive readers of the universal aspect of his personal nightmare.

Like Blake, David Lindsay’s aim [in A Voyage to Arcturus] is precisely apocalyptic: our relation to the natural world and to ourselves as natural men and women is to be broken, once and for all. No book, be it Blake’s Jerusalem or A Voyage to Arcturus, can achieve so Sublime...