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
I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses a nostalgic lament for the decline of classic literature in favor of contemporary works.
Harold Bloom reflects on the cultural shift in literature, where modern authors like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling are celebrated while the works of literary giants like Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll are neglected. His elegiac sadness captures a deep concern for the loss of literary richness and the appreciation of classic works that shaped literature and society in the past.
Themes
LiteratureNostalgiaClassicReadingCulture
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of literature in schools.
More from Harold Bloom
All quotes →I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
Harold BloomRead
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
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