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" I recall writing, long ago, that any new poem is rather like a little child who has been stationed with a large group of other small children in a playroom, where there are a limited number of toys and no adult supervision whatsoever. Those toys are the tricks, turns, and tropes of poetic language, Oscar Wilde’s “beautiful untrue things” that save the imagination from falling into “careless habits of accuracy.” Oscar, who worshipped and twice visited Walt during an American tour, charmingly termed criticism “the only civilized form of autobiography.” I have aged not, alas, into Wilde’s wit but into a firm conviction that true criticism recognizes itself as a mode of memoir. "

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


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Harold Bloom quote : I recall writing, long ago, that any new poem is rather like a little child who has been stationed with a large group of other small children in a playroom, where there are a limited number of toys and no adult supervision whatsoever. Those toys are the tricks, turns, and tropes of poetic language, Oscar Wilde’s “beautiful untrue things” that save the imagination from falling into “careless habits of accuracy.” Oscar, who worshipped and twice visited Walt during an American tour, charmingly termed criticism “the only civilized form of autobiography.” I have aged not, alas, into Wilde’s wit but into a firm conviction that true criticism recognizes itself as a mode of memoir.