What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude. – Harold Bloom
Criticism in the universities, Ill have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. Its Stalinism without Stalin. – Harold Bloom
We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough that we need to know ourselves better that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. – Harold Bloom
People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I – Harold Bloom