The Daemon Knows Quotes

“Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“seeking comfort through continuity, as grand voices somehow hold off the permanent darkness that gathers though it does not fall.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“Denying Ahab greatness is an aesthetic blunder: He is akin to Achilles, Odysseus, and King David in one register, and to Don Quixote, Hamlet, and the High Romantic Prometheus of Goethe and Shelley in another. Call the first mode a transcendent heroism and the second the persistence of vision. Both ways are antithetical to nature and protest against our mortality. The epic hero will never submit or yield.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“The James family, raised by their Emersonian father, accepted their heritage, with reservations by Henry yet fewer by William.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“American Religionists, when I questioned them, frequently said that falling in love was affirming again Christ’s love for each of them.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“Whitman’s art: to promise absolute self-revelation and give us fresh gestures of evasion, hesitation, concealment. Better thus, though Walt proclaimed: “I swear I dare not shirk any part of myself.” Stevens learned from Whitman “the intricate evasions of as.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“I recall writing, long ago, that any new poem is rather like a little child who has been stationed with a large group of other small children in a playroom, where there are a limited number of toys and no adult supervision whatsoever. Those toys are the tricks, turns, and tropes of poetic language, Oscar Wilde’s “beautiful untrue things” that save the imagination from falling into “careless habits of accuracy.” Oscar, who worshipped and twice visited Walt during an American tour, charmingly termed criticism “the only civilized form of autobiography.” I have aged not, alas, into Wilde’s wit but into a firm conviction that true criticism recognizes itself as a mode of memoir.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“You get too much at last of everything: of sunsets, of cabbages, of love.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“Oscar Wilde’s “beautiful untrue things” that save the imagination from falling into “careless habits of accuracy.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“At eighty-four, I can only write the way I go on teaching, personally and passionately.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“The pre-Socratic aphorism—ethos is the daemon—can be translated as “character is fate.” In drama, character is action. Shakespeare, too capacious for any formula, leads me to a rival aphorism: Pathos also is the daemon, which could be rendered as “personality is our destiny.” In Shakespearean theatricalism, personality is suffering. Action, Wordsworth wrote, is momentary, while suffering is permanent, obscure, dark, and shares the nature of infinity.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“cannot, with Nietzsche and with Pater, believe that life can only be appreciated as an aesthetic phenomenon. But I wish to believe that, and perhaps Judaic tradition blocks me from it. Wisdom needs to be added to aesthetic splendor and cognitive power as the three stigmata or criteria of knowledge or value. But where except in Shakespeare are all three to be discovered consistently?”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“Poets and critics alike seek to convert opinion into knowledge, but this means opinion in the legal and not the public sense. What is it you know when you recognize a voice?”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“the great artist of the intransitive verb also avoided objects of his sexual drive; what evidence we have indicates that he carnally embraced himself only, and walked the open road with only the thought of death and the knowledge of death as his close companions”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“I again recall provoking resentment by dubbing the American bard “a male lesbian,” much as Shakespeare was when writing the sonnets.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“Knowledge of what? If, as Epicurus insisted, the what is unknowable, Walt’s knowledge is a personal gnosis, in which the knower himself is known by whatever can be known.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“A poet who equates his soul with the fourfold metaphor of night, death, the mother, and the sea is thinking figuratively as fiercely as did the Hermeticists and the Kabbalists.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“Is becoming wise an act of knowledge? For Nietzsche, the greatest thoughts were the greatest actions. Thinking in and through metaphors, Shakespeare gives us persons who act with titanic self-destructiveness, incarnate sublimity:”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“The elliptical mode in her poetry recalls late Shakespeare but is more extreme. A daemonic drive to negate precursors while maintaining their standards of excellence distinguishes her from some recent poetical ideologues of the feminist persuasion, whether in verse or prose. They claim Dickinson as ancestor, yet they do her wrong, she being so majestical, to offer her the show of violence.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

“Yet as readers, writers, and teachers, our authentic context is the myriad countrymen and -women who live in a daily reality that is mostly not at all our own. Socioeconomic reductions of their stance help only in a limited way. Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate.”
― Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime