What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

Harold Bloom Quotes