Harold Bloom on the King James Bible

Modern languages are vanishing, Latin is off the map, but the single most lamentable difference I notice between my education in the 1970s and my children’s today is the disappearance from the classroom of the King James Bible, replaced by recent translations. I grew up in an atheist immigrant household, cultured but lacking familiarity with the English classics. At school, the first great literature I heard – crucially, it was read aloud, for all to know – was the KJB. It not only opened a door to the workings of language at its richest, most mysterious and eloquent; it echoed with and later made understandable four centuries of literary creation, from Milton to Charlotte Brontë to Ruskin to Jeanette Winterson.