Harold Bloom

I keep urging the work of the reader’s sublime: confront only the writers who are capable of giving you a sense of something ever more about to be.

Reading a sublime poet, such as Pindar or Sappho, we experience something akin to authorship: “We come to believe we have created what we have only heard.”

“Strangeness” for me is the canonical quality, the mark of sublime literature. Your dictionary will give you assurance that the word extraneous, still in common use, is also the Latin origin of strange: “foreign,” “outside,” “out of doors.” Strangeness is uncanniness: the estrangement of the homelike or commonplace. This estrangement is likely to manifest itself differently in writers and readers. But in both cases strangeness renders the deep relation between sublimity and influence palpable.