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I Won't Say He [shakespeare] 'invented' Us, Because Journalists Perpetually Misunderstand Me On That. I'll Put It More Simply: He Contains Us. Our Ways Of Thinking And Feeling-about Ourselves, Those We Love, Those We Hate, Those We Realize Are Hopelessly 'other' To Us-are More Shaped By Shakespeare Than They Are By The Experience Of Our Own Lives.

-Harold Bloom

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I Won't Say He

Harold Bloom

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I Won't Say He [shakespeare] 'invented' Us, Because Journalists Perpetually Misunderstand Me On That. I'll Put It More Simply: He Contains Us. Our Ways Of Thinking And Feeling-about Ourselves, Those We Love, Those We Hate, Those We Realize Are Hopelessly 'other' To Us-are More Shaped By Shakespeare Than They Are By The Experience Of Our Own Lives.

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I Won't Say He [shakespeare] 'invented' Us, Because Journalists Perpetually Misunderstand Me On That. I'll Put It More Simply: He Contains Us. Our Ways Of Thinking And Feeling-about Ourselves, Those We Love, Those We Hate, Those We Realize Are Hopelessly 'other' To Us-are More Shaped By Shakespeare Than They Are By The Experience Of Our Own Lives.

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Real Reading Is A Lonely Activity.

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Criticism In The Universities, I'll Have To Admit, Has Entered A Phase Where I Am Totally Out Of Sympathy With 95% Of What Goes On. It's Stalinism Without Stalin.

What Is Literary Tradition? What Is A Classic? What Is A Canonical View Of Tradition? How Are Canons Of Accepted Classics Formed,and How Are They Unformed? I Think That All These Quite Traditional Questions Can Take One Simplistic But Still Dialectical Question As Their Summing Up: Do We Choose Tradition Or Does It Choose Us, And Why Is It Necessary That A Choosing Take Place, Or A Being Chosen? What Happens If One Tries To Write, Or To Teach, Or To Think, Or Even To Read Without The Sense Of A Tradition? Why, Nothing At All Happens, Just Nothing.

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 Take It That A Successful Therapy Is An Oxymoron.

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There Is A God, And His Name Is Aristophanes.

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I Am Naive Enough To Read Incessantly Because I Cannot, On My Own, Get To Know Enough People Profoundly Enough.

Read Deeply, Not To Believe, Not To Accept, Not To Contradict, But To Learn To Share In That One Nature That Writes And Reads.

More Even Than Southern Presbyterians And Southern Methodists, The Baptists Provided The Great Mass Of Confederate Enlisted Men.

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The Morality Of Scholarship, As Currently Practiced, Is To Encourage Everyone To Replace Difficult Pleasures By Pleasures Universally Accessible Precisely Because They Are Easier.

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Rebecca Mead's My Life In Middlemarch Is A Wise, Humane, And Delightful Study Of What Some Regard As The Best Novel In English. Mead Has Discovered An Original And Highly Personal Way To Make Herself An Inhabitant Both Of The Book And Of George Eliot's Imaginary City. Though I Have Read And Taught The Book These Many Years I Find Myself Desiring To Go Back To It After Reading Rebecca Mead's Work.

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