Harold Bloom Quotes

The book I'm working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.

The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.

Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches, nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.

Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.

Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language.

I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.

I still believe many poets begin in fear and hope: fear that the poetic past will turn out to be a monologue rather than a conversation. And hope that their voice can be heard as that past turns into a future.

I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.

I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.

So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work.

Sometimes, for me, lyrics are derived from poems that I'm working on, and they kind of cross back and forth between the two.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

There's this idea that if you want to write, you shouldn't study literature because then you're dissecting what you love, and you should keep your love of literature pure. I think that's kind of silly.

What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.

I'm not much of a Rick Moody fan, but I want to be a fan for the Rick Moody I thought might appear after his first two novels, 'Garden State' (1992) and 'The Ice Storm' (1994).

You have to write some poetry, first of all, to decide if you can become a lyricist. I was born in a family of poets.

I'm an essayist. And this is a genre that has existed for a few thousand years. Ever heard of Cicero? So these rules that I'm working under are not mine but rather were established by writers who recognized the difference between the hard research of journalism and the kind of inquiry of mind that characterizes the essay.

Find a poet whose style you like, emulate that style, then deal with things that you know about - don't waste your time looking for your own style.' I wish I could remember who told me that, because I'd like to congraulate him. I've emulated all the old guys - Tennyson, Alexander Pope.

I absolutely wasn't going to write a book if it was just going to be about punk.