Harold Bloom

E. R. Dodds, whose classic study The Greek and the Irrational I have reread literally to pieces, distinguishes the psyche from the daimon, relying first on Empedocles and then on what is most mysterious in Socrates. The psyche is the empirical self or rational soul, while the divine daimon is an occult self or nonrational soul. From Hellenistic times through Goethe, the daimon has been the poet’s genius.

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.

“It is not correlative with wonder; for wonder is our reaction to things which we are conscious of not quite understanding, or at any rate of understanding less than we had thought. The element of strangeness in beauty has the contrary effect. It arises from contact with a different kind of consciousness from our own, different, yet not so remote that we cannot partly share it, as indeed, in such a connection, the mere word ‘contact’ implies. Strangeness, in fact, arouses wonder when we do not understand: aesthetic imagination when we do.”

Shakespeare, when you give yourself completely to reading him, surprises you by the strangeness which I take to be his salient quality. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands. The difference between reading Shakespeare and reading nearly any other writer is that greater widening of our consciousness into what initially must seem a strangeness of woe or wonder.