226 Quotes by Harold Bloom

To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory “pipe dreams” is right also.

The James family, raised by their Emersonian father, accepted their heritage, with reservations by Henry yet fewer by William.

To condemn Wordsworth for not writing verse of political and social protest, or for having forsaken the revolution, is to cross the final divide between academic arrogance and moral smugness.

Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for “transport”.

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad, “tuned the English tongue.

I don’t believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards to the literary scene. The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent. The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature.

Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate.

Frye’s influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, July 11, 1967, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, “The Covering Cherub; or, Poetic Influence.

A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity’s disorders, including the fear of mortality.