Education Quote by Harold Bloom

Bloom is doing what he so often did: turning the supposedly neutral machinery of criticism into another scene of poetic struggle. The point isn’t a cute paradox. It’s a power move. By insisting that any stance a critic, scholar, or teacher takes toward a poem is “inevitably and necessarily poetic,” he collapses the hierarchy that pretends the poem is the lone site of imagination while criticism merely files reports. If reading is always already poetic, then the critic isn’t an auditor; he’s a rival maker.

The phrasing matters. “Increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate” is Bloom’s characteristic mix of authority and provocation: he claims a long campaign while admitting the argument is less a proof than a performance. The repetition of “I think” signals a mind talking its way into inevitability, converting personal insistence into a general law. That’s Bloom at his most candidly rhetorical: persuasion as style.

The subtext is defensive and imperial at once. Defensive, because Bloom is writing against schools of criticism that want to treat poems as symptoms (of history, ideology, identity), where the critic’s posture is implicitly scientific. Imperial, because he reclaims criticism for the aesthetic by declaring even the anti-aesthetic critic “poetic” in spite of himself. You can analyze a poem like a sociologist, Bloom suggests, but your “stance” still becomes a kind of poem: shaped, selective, metaphor-driven, haunted by language.

Contextually, this fits Bloom’s lifelong argument that interpretation is creative misreading. The critic can’t escape making; the only honest question is whether they make something strong, or merely pretend they aren’t making at all.