I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.
BLOOM: I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
Wild with laughter, Twelfth Night is nevertheless almost always on the edge of violence.
We'll try this first. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else. That's life, isn't it?
We are lived by drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist.
The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only th...
My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of [Stephen] King's fictions.
Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy.
Every poet begins (however 'unconsciously') by rebelling more strongly against the fear of death than all other men and women do.
Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.
Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket
Calling a work of sufficient literary power either religious or secular is a political decision, not an aesthetic one.
[Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid of self-knowledge, and careening o...
You get too much at last of everything: of sunsets, of cabbages, of love.
Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.
The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.
Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate.
One doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity not...
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substa...