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.
The most used program in computers and education is PowerPoint. What are you learning about the nature of the medium by knowing how do to a great PowerPoint presentation? Nothing. It certainly doesn't teach you how to think critically about living in a culture of simulation.
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.
In Austria an editor who can write well is valuable, but he is not likely to remain so unless he can handle a sabre with charm.
If I had a choice of educating my daughters or my sons because of opportunity constraints, I would choose to educate my daughters.
We urgently need a paradigm shift in our concept of the purposes and practices of education. We need to leave behind the concept of education as a passport to more money and higher status in the future and replace it with a concept of education as an ongoing process that enlists the tremendous energies and creativity of schoolchildren in rebuilding and respiriting our communities and our cities now, in the present.
Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
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