Every critic has (or should have) her or his own favorite critical joke. Mine is to compare “Freudian literary criticism” to the Holy Roman Empire: not holy, not Roman, not an empire; not Freudian, not literary, not criticism.
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon
Unfortunately, nothing will ever be the same because the art and passion of reading well and deeply, which was the foundation of our enterprise, depended upon people who were fanatical readers when they were still small children. Even devoted and solitary readers are now necessarily beleaguered, because they cannot be certain that fresh generations will rise up to prefer Shakespeare and Dante to all other writers. The shadows lengthen in our evening land, and we approach the second millennium expecting shadowing.
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, from the chapter rather dramatically titled “An Elegy for the Canon”
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