"Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails"
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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails: a sentence so flat it dares you to look away. Coming from Harold Bloom, that flatness is the point. Bloom built a career on baroque judgments, grand genealogies of influence, and the high-wire act of declaring who mattered and who didn’t. Here he suddenly strips the critic’s usual arsenal down to a coin toss. It’s not resignation; it’s a corrective.
The intent reads like a rebuke to our culture of permanent verdicts. In an era that wants the author to be either genius or fraud, the book either “essential” or “problematic,” Bloom’s line insists on the ordinary rhythm that reputation-sculptors try to deny: achievement is uneven, and failure is not a moral category. The subtext is anti-therapeutic and anti-brand. It rejects the contemporary demand that a writer, thinker, or even a life must present a coherent arc of progress. Bloom, who obsessed over how poets wrestle with their precursors, knows that artistic history is made of botched attempts as much as breakthroughs. Influence itself is a record of misfires.
Context matters because Bloom’s criticism often sounded like certainty incarnate. That makes this aphorism quietly radical: it admits contingency at the heart of judgment. It’s also a self-portrait. The critic who pronounced canons is conceding the critic’s own vulnerability to time, taste, and error. The sentence works because it refuses to dress up that vulnerability as wisdom. It’s just the weather report of making things: sometimes the storm clears, sometimes it doesn’t.
The intent reads like a rebuke to our culture of permanent verdicts. In an era that wants the author to be either genius or fraud, the book either “essential” or “problematic,” Bloom’s line insists on the ordinary rhythm that reputation-sculptors try to deny: achievement is uneven, and failure is not a moral category. The subtext is anti-therapeutic and anti-brand. It rejects the contemporary demand that a writer, thinker, or even a life must present a coherent arc of progress. Bloom, who obsessed over how poets wrestle with their precursors, knows that artistic history is made of botched attempts as much as breakthroughs. Influence itself is a record of misfires.
Context matters because Bloom’s criticism often sounded like certainty incarnate. That makes this aphorism quietly radical: it admits contingency at the heart of judgment. It’s also a self-portrait. The critic who pronounced canons is conceding the critic’s own vulnerability to time, taste, and error. The sentence works because it refuses to dress up that vulnerability as wisdom. It’s just the weather report of making things: sometimes the storm clears, sometimes it doesn’t.
Quote Details
| Topic | Failure |
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