The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic. -Harold Bloom Teacher
Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin. -Harold Bloom Sympathy
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 Strength
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 Knowledge
