Poetic Education and Harold Bloom

The sentences are the most vatic and deranged in American criticism: Milton is “the Sphinx who strangles even strong imaginations in their cradle”; “To be judicious is to be weak, and to compare, exactly and fairly, is to be not elect”; “A poet…is not so much a man speaking to men as a man rebelling against being spoken to by a dead man … outrageously more alive than himself.” They are ridiculous, and then you begin to recognize your own mind in them, whether as it is or as it might be with a certain repression lifted, if you could gaze unveiled at the thing toward which your heart or imagination or ego throbbed.