Tuesday, December 11, 2007

From Harold Bloom's Paris Review interview, taken more or less out of any context:

Criticism starts—it has to start—with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems. You must fall in love with what we used to call "imaginative literature." And when you are in love that way, with or without provocation from good teachers, you will pass on to encounter what used to be called the sublime....

I mean, I don't know, I don't read much specific criticism, by Bloom or anybody, because either I haven't read the book discussed yet, so why bother, or I've read the book in question, and I'm too wrapped up in my own thoughts to want them to be all mollycoddled by someone smarter than me—but I do dig on when totally smart critics say totally basic things in totally smart ways, that somehow sum up some of the experience of sitting down in a chair (or on an ottoman) and reading a book and loving it. It's comforting, which is nice. Now and then.