Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, politics, or institutionalised religion. At its strong...
Hope and joy, however irrational, are stronger than dispair, and ultimately more pernicious.
Don’t be looking for trifles, Señor Don Quixote, or expect things to be impossibly perfect. Are not a thousand comedies performed almost every day that are full of inaccuracies and absurdities, yet th...
Calling a work of sufficient literary power either religious or secular is a political decision, not an aesthetic one.
BLOOM: I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
American Religionists, when I questioned them, frequently said that falling in love was affirming again Christ’s love for each of them.
You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is in this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespear...
We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.
Urging the need for community upon American religionists is a vain enterprise; the experiential encounter with Jesus or God is too overwhelming for memories of community to abide, and the believer ret...
Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
Oscar Wilde’s beautiful untrue things that save the imagination from falling into careless habits of accuracy.
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.
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
The tragic sense of life in Don Quixote is also the faith of Moby Dick. Ahab is a monomaniac; so is the kindlier Quixote, but both are tormented idealists who seek justice in human terms, not as theoc...
The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aest...
Jesus is present only as a supreme representation of suffering and change, one that Shakespeare (in his dangerous era) shrewdly and invariably avoided.
But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives a...
What could Yeshua of Nazareth have made of Martin Luther's outburst Death to the Law! which in many German Lutherans who served Hitler became Death to the Jews! The Germans would not have crucified Je...
Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.
Gertrude Stein remarked that one writes for oneself and for strangers, which I translate as speaking both to myself (which is what great poetry teaches us how to do) and to those dissident readers aro...