Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"The democratic age mourns the value of human beings."
44 Quotes
"The democratic age mourns the value of human beings."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket"
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for "transport"."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, "one that expects no liberation from liberation."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
"Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human."
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
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