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.
Harold BloomRead
Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.
Interpretation
To criticize effectively, one must have a deep appreciation for literature, especially poetry.
Harold Bloom emphasizes that genuine criticism is rooted in a passionate engagement with reading, particularly poetry. This suggests that a profound understanding and love for the written word is essential to develop insightful critiques, which can emerge at a young age, such as during adolescence or young adulthood.
In practice
During a literary discussion at a book club, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of loving literature.
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.
I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.
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.
But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.
Your teacher might be a child who takes you by the hand and asks you a question that you hadn't considered before, and your answer to the child is your answer to yourself.
There's something missing about how we're informing the youngsters coming along about what matters in the world. We teach them the numbers and the letters, but we fail to communicate the importance of our connection to the living world.
Children are the most wonderful audiences. What's struck me most is that that they watch it so silently, until the end when they shriek and shout and clap.
[I]t's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.
We have a lot of kids who don't know what works means. They think work is a four-letter word.
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