" Yet as readers, writers, and teachers, our authentic context is the myriad countrymen and -women who live in a daily reality that is mostly not at all our own. Socioeconomic reductions of their stance help only in a limited way. Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate. "

― Harold Bloom , The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime