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Book: The Western Canon
Quotes of Book: The Western Canon

Harold Bloom _ The Western Canon
To condemn Wordsworth for not writing verse of political and social protest, or for having forsaken the revolution, is to cross the final divide between academic arrogance and moral smugness.
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Harold Bloom _ The Western Canon
Calling a work of sufficient literary power either religious or secular is a political decision, not an aesthetic one.
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Harold Bloom _ The Western Canon
Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett's canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett's Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare's Hamlet.
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Harold Bloom _ The Western Canon
Gertrude Stein maintained that one wrote for oneself and for strangers, a superb recognition that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers. The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire {and Erich Auerbach after him} called "aesthetic dignity." One of the ineluctable stigmata of the canonical is aesthetic dignity, which is not to be hired."
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Harold Bloom _ The Western Canon
Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.
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Harold Bloom _ The Western Canon
We are great fools. "He has spent his life in idleness," we say; "I have done nothing today." What, have you not lived? That is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations. . . . To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.
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Harold Bloom _ The Western Canon
monsters of selfishness and exploitation. To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all. The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.
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Harold Bloom _ The Western Canon
The freedom to apprehend aesthetic value may rise from class conflict, but the value is not identical with the freedom, even if it cannot be achieved without that apprehension. Aesthetic value is by definition engendered by an interaction between artists, an influencing that is always an interpretation."
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Harold Bloom _ The Western Canon
The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire {and Erich Auerbach after him} called "aesthetic dignity." One
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Harold Bloom _ The Western Canon
Don't be looking for trifles, Señor Don Quixote, or expect things to be impossibly perfect. Are not a thousand comedies performed almost every day that are full of inaccuracies and absurdities, yet they run their course and are received not only with applause but with admiration and all the rest?
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Harold Bloom _ The Western Canon
The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality. W
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Harold Bloom _ The Western Canon
The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.
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