I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
Harold BloomRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote acknowledges our common fears while highlighting the illuminating power of poetry.
Harold Bloom reflects on the universal fears of loneliness, madness, and death that plague humanity. He suggests that while even the greatest poets like Shakespeare and Whitman cannot eradicate these fears, their works provide a profound source of inspiration and enlightenment, offering 'fire and light' in the darkness of our existential concerns.
Themes
LonelinessMadnessDyingPoetryFearIlluminationInspiration
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of art, one could reference Bloom's quote to illustrate how poetry addresses deep human fears.
More from Harold Bloom
All quotes →Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold BloomRead
Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
Harold BloomRead
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.
Harold BloomRead
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.
Harold BloomRead
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
Harold BloomRead
Similar quotes
If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don't want to open up my cornflakes and find that they're full of pebbles... You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn't.
Margaret AtwoodRead
He didn't want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.
Martin AmisRead
I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction
Orson Scott CardRead
Even though I read voraciously as a child, I never saw myself in books. Without narratives to expand my ideas of who I could be, I accepted the stories others told me about myself, stories which diminished and belittled me and people like me. I want to write against that.
Jesmyn WardRead
I’ve always believed that as an author, I do 50% of the work of storytelling, and the reader does the other 50%. There’s no way I can control the story you tell yourself from my book. Your own experiences, preferences, prejudices, mood at the moment, current events in your life, needs and wants influence how you read my every word.
Shannon HaleRead
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace StevensRead