How To Read and Why

Why do you read? Is it for knowledge, escape, or connection? Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why asks you to go deeper—to read not for utility or information but for the strengthening of the self. Bloom sees reading as an art of self-knowledge, a way of cultivating wisdom and individuality in an age of distraction. For him, the question of how to read cannot be separated from why we read. Each act of literary engagement is an encounter with 'the otherness' that heals loneliness, sharpens intellect, and restores the capacity to think freely in a world saturated with cant and conformity.

Bloom argues that reading well is less about technique than discipline and receptivity. You read for yourself, not for society, and certainly not for ideology. The best literature—from Shakespeare’s plays to Dickinson’s poems and Proust’s novels—does not solve problems or improve communities; it enlarges consciousness. Bloom’s aim is to teach reading not through tools or theory but through example, using a wealth of texts—stories, poems, novels, and plays—to show how literature can refine your inner life.

Reading as a Solitary Art

Drawing on Dr. Samuel Johnson, Francis Bacon, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bloom proposes reading as a solitary praxis, an act of self-trust. He warns that today’s culture—academic and popular alike—has lost its ironic sense and succumbed to ideological cant. To read well, you must clear your mind of pious platitudes and seek what ‘comes near to yourself.’ Reading is selfish, Bloom declares, and that selfishness is noble. Plato’s suspicion of poetic pleasure and modern social moralism both fail to grasp that literature’s power is private and regenerative. Reading does not make you virtuous or civic-minded; it makes you more alive.

The Antidote to Ideology

Bloom insists you must resist reading as activism or historicism. Don’t read to reform your neighbors or to confirm your biases. Instead, read “by the inner light” celebrated by Milton and Emerson—the flame of imaginative independence that lights the solitary scholar. In an era where universities replace Dickens and Browning with cultural polemics, Bloom urges readers to recover the private pleasure of literature. The task is not to interpret texts as social documents but as mirrors of consciousness. The aim, again echoing Emerson, is self-trust: the courage to misread creatively so that you transform your encounter with a book into a revelation of your own mind.

Irony and the Discipline of Attention

Bloom laments the loss of irony—the ability to sustain conflicting truths without collapse. Irony, he writes, is the lifeblood of civilization and the soul of intelligent reading. Without it, literature and culture alike devolve into literalism and ideology. To read is to cultivate a long attention span, a disciplined awareness that can hold contradictions. Hamlet’s endless ironies, Dickinson’s precarious gait “some call experience,” and Thomas Mann’s aesthetic detachment all reveal conditions of reading: openness, depth, patience, and the refusal of certainty.

The Canon as Living Companionship

To Bloom, the Western literary canon is not a hierarchy but a set of partners in dialogue. You read Shakespeare, Cervantes, Proust, and Dickinson not because they are old but because they remain alive in the mind. When culture delegitimizes greatness, what dies is not elitism but depth. The solitary reader becomes the true inheritor of civilization—a candle in the dark, to borrow Emerson’s phrase. The reader’s task is to keep that flame alive, to reread and misread until great works reveal their inexhaustible ironies.

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you… because it is the most healing of pleasures.” —Harold Bloom

In the end, Bloom advocates reading as an act of resistance—a way to preserve inner freedom against the collective mind. To reread deeply is to strengthen the self, to discover the difficult pleasures that lead to the sublime, and to find friendships across centuries with Turgenev’s peasants, Emily Dickinson’s reflections, Hamlet’s torments, and Proust’s long search for consciousness. That is his answer to the question “how to read and why”: because, through reading, you become more yourself, more strange and more complete.

Bloom’s first principle of reading well is simple but demanding: Clear your mind of cant. Cant, in Dr. Johnson’s definition, means the speech and habits of pious or factional sentiment—the moral platitudes that replace thought. In Bloom’s view, most contemporary reading, especially in universities, is saturated with cant: ideological frameworks that reduce literature to social agenda. You cannot encounter Shakespeare or Dickinson freshly while wearing the spectacles of political correctness or historical determinism. Reading well begins with stripping away that layer of piety and recovering independent judgment.

Rejecting Ideological Reading

Bloom chastises the “academic covens” of gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism not because diversity of thought is bad, but because dogma is. When ideology teaches you what to see, you cease to see at all. Historicism, he says, is idolatry—the worship of things in time. To restore reading, you must value the idiosyncratic and excessive, the qualities by which literature begins meaning. Hamlet and Lear are not case studies for social theory; they are mirrors for consciousness. When critics reduce Shakespeare to colonial politics, they lose Shakespeare and find only themselves.

Reading for Self-Improvement, Not Social Reform

Bloom’s second principle follows naturally: do not read to improve your neighbors or to reform the world. There are no “ethics of reading.” Literature’s task is self-improvement—a lifetime project for mind and spirit. Premature activism diverts attention from the inner work of understanding. You don’t need to read in order to cure injustice or uplift humanity; you read to purge your own ignorance, the primal ignorance of not knowing who you are. Only through solitude and depth can the mind discover its authentic interests, which may later illumine others without effort or coercion.

Reading as a Light to Others

Yet Bloom does not advocate an antisocial isolation. His third principle echoes Emerson: “A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.” If you cultivate your inner reading self, others will be illuminated by your example, not your preaching. A reader’s authenticity, like wisdom, radiates indirectly. Bloom often recalls letters from strangers yearning for canonical study—proof that the solitary reader, though alone, can kindle others through the visible glow of attention and devotion.

“You need not fear that the freedom of your development as a reader is selfish, because if you become an authentic reader, then the response to your labors will confirm you as an illumination to others.” —Harold Bloom

To clear the mind of cant is not merely moral hygiene; it is the first step toward seeing literature as literature rather than politics or sermon. Only then can you read Johnson’s wisdom, Emerson’s freedom, or Shakespeare’s irony with full clarity. It asks courage—to think for yourself, against fashionable consensus—and patience, to weigh and consider. But Bloom’s quiet urgency remains: your freedom as a reader is the measure of your freedom as a person.

For Bloom, reading is the most healing of pleasures—the joy that solitude affords. He insists that the greatest friendship you can form may be with books, because books embody 'otherness' that alleviates loneliness. You read not because you cannot meet enough people, but because friends vanish, love falters, and time erodes sympathy. Literature offers lasting companionship through imaginative empathy. When you read Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog,” you grasp the ache of intimacy without names; in Turgenev’s peasant boys of “Bezhin Lea,” you witness the human vulnerability that joins all experience.

Reading as Friendship with Otherness

Bloom calls literature “imaginative otherness.” The self expands by turning toward that otherness—characters, authors, even voices within yourself—that you could not know otherwise. Reading well demands empathy without manipulation; you let the work speak with its full distinctness until it transforms your inner conversation. When you read Dickinson or Chekhov, you practice listening to souls unlike yours but equally human. It is through such acts that solitude becomes a communion rather than exile.

Reading Against the Clock

Bloom contrasts authentic solitary reading with the frenetic consumption of information. We read, he says, “against the clock.” The urgency is not external deadlines but mortality itself—“the final change.” Bible readers seeking truth in solitude and Shakespeare readers seeking wisdom pursue the same quest: to prepare the self for what cannot be avoided. Reading becomes existential rehearsal, not academic performance. It is a way of enduring your going hence even as your going hither, learning ripeness as life’s ultimate discipline.

The Reader’s Sublime

Bloom introduces a beautiful idea—the “reader’s sublime.” This is not transcendence through faith but through difficulty: the pleasure of wrestling with a work whose beauty resists easy meaning. To read deeply is to fall in love precariously, to experience “pleasurable difficulty” like Turgenev’s encounter with fate or Dickinson’s poem about walking between stars and sea. The sublime reading experience, Bloom writes, is the only secular transcendence most of us will ever know, parallel only to falling in love.

“There is a reader’s Sublime, and it seems the only secular transcendence we shall ever attain, except for the even more precarious transcendence we call ‘falling in love.’” —Harold Bloom

Solitary reading, for Bloom, becomes an act of healing precisely because it restores the inwardness modern life erodes. He calls readers to slow down, reread, wrestle with difficulty, and accept loneliness as the price of depth. In this way, literature turns solitude into joy—the joy of meeting minds that never die and of realizing, as Bloom reminds you, that “the reader becomes the book.”

Bloom teaches reading by immersion in examples. His analyses of short stories—Turgenev’s “Bezhin Lea,” Chekhov’s “The Kiss,” Maupassant’s “The Horla,” Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Nabokov’s “The Vane Sisters,” and Borges’s “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”—offer readers a masterclass in noticing how art reveals consciousness. Every story, he says, answers the question 'Why read?' by showing reality refracted through human spirit.

From Turgenev to Chekhov: Learning Compassion

Turgenev’s peasant boys in “Bezhin Lea” reveal the beauty of vulnerability and fate through simple dialogue about goblins and mermaids. Bloom shows that reading short fiction like this trains you to value tact and detachment—the ability to observe life without judgment. Chekhov extends that subtlety: his “The Kiss” and “The Lady with the Dog” teach that truth brings despair but also cheerfulness. You learn not moral lessons but aesthetic ones—the wisdom of seeing clearly. Bloom compares Chekhov’s humane detachment to Shakespeare’s tragic joy and calls it 'a form of the good.'

From Maupassant to Hemingway: The Art of Precision

Maupassant, Flaubert’s disciple, teaches the gift of seeing precisely—the patience of talent. His energy, Bloom shows, anticipates Hemingway’s meticulous sentences. In “Hills Like White Elephants,” a five-page story about an abortion, Hemingway turns repetition and silence into moral geometry. You learn to read implication: seven 'pleases' in one line reveal emotional defeat. Reading Hemingway, Bloom says, is to measure reality’s cruelty through understatement—a discipline of empathy and irony.

From O’Connor to Borges: Faith and Fantasy

O’Connor’s Catholic grotesques teach how extremity leads to comic revelation. Her murderers and prophets, like the Misfit, mock virtue and expose grace. Borges, on the other hand, replaces Chekhovian realism with labyrinths of infinite mirrors. His 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' transforms reality into literature, proving that reading itself is creation. Bloom reads these stories to show that the art of noticing—tone, irony, structure—is how you read well. The purpose is not method but maturity: learning to weigh and consider like Bacon and Johnson.

“Short stories favor the tacit; they compel the reader to be active, and to discern explanations the writer avoids.” —Harold Bloom

By tracing these masters of brevity, Bloom makes short stories a training ground for subtle thought. They force you to listen with the inner ear and discern implications that transcend plot. You learn from Turgenev’s tact, Chekhov’s irony, Hemingway’s minimalism, O’Connor’s ferocity, and Borges’s paradox that reading is a discipline of patience—a way of seeing what others overlook.

For Bloom, poetry is the crown of imaginative literature because it is prophetic. It does not describe reality—it creates experience. His chapters on poets from Housman to Shelly trace how poetry transforms perception into revelation. Reading a poem, he says, is listening for the deepest voice in the self—the prophetic moment when words burst beyond sense into vision.

The Lyric and the Dramatic

Housman’s “Into My Heart an Air That Kills” shows how irony can turn nostalgia into immortality. Blake’s “The Sick Rose” reveals how a worm’s secret love becomes prophecy of nature’s decay. Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” Shakespeare’s sonnets, and Browning’s monologues all teach the art of self-overhearing—discovering your mind as you listen to it speaking. Bloom likens reading poetry to overhearing your own consciousness expand. The poets revive the prophetic mode—emotion charged into thought and thought into revelation.

Self-Reliance in Whitman and Dickinson

Whitman’s Song of Myself and Dickinson’s cryptic hymns extend Emerson’s doctrine of self-trust. Whitman turns solitude into democracy: his 'Me myself' is both self and soul. Dickinson turns introspection into cosmic irony: her poems walk between the stars and the sea. Reading them teaches you that self-reliance is not pride but spiritual independence—the ability to create meaning when the world refuses to offer it.

The Difficult Pleasures of the Sublime

Bloom urges you to memorize and reread poetry until it possesses you. This is how its difficulty becomes pleasure. Milton’s Satan, Wordsworth’s visionary child, Shelley’s “triumph of life,” and Keats’s fatal beauty all embody the sublime—pleasure born from confrontation with what exceeds the self. Poetry teaches endurance through awe, the discipline of accepting uncertainty. When Wordsworth asks you to 'walk where your own nature would be leading,' he offers what Bloom calls the poetic wisdom of self-renewal—reading as discovery of what lies beyond comfort.

“Poems can help us to speak to ourselves more clearly and more fully, and to overhear that speaking.” —Harold Bloom

Poetry’s prophetic self-reliance thus becomes Bloom’s clearest answer to why you read: to recover the voice of imagination, the solitude that endures, and the difficult joy that renews your inner world. Poems, he writes, are not mirrors but flames—you come away illuminated, altered, and more awake.

When Bloom turns to the novel, he shifts from aesthetics of perception to a grammar of consciousness. Reading novels, he says, trains your awareness of change—psychological, moral, and existential. From Cervantes’s Don Quixote to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the novel becomes the art of seeing how selves evolve. To read fiction is to exercise empathy through transformation.

Shakespeare and Cervantes as Origins

Bloom calls Cervantes and Shakespeare twin gods of the Western imagination—the inventors of human depth. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza teach dialogue and friendship as spiritual growth, complementing Hamlet’s self-overhearing. You change either through conversation (the Cervantine way) or inner reflection (the Shakespearean way). Reading becomes a rehearsal of both: you learn self-awareness through empathy and irony.

The Art of Change

Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, Austen’s Emma, Dickens’s Great Expectations, and James’s The Portrait of a Lady all depict transformation through error. Their protagonists—Fabrice, Emma Woodhouse, Pip, and Isabel Archer—discover themselves through mistakes. Reading them teaches patience with human imperfection; you learn that consciousness matures through failure. Bloom’s insight: the novel is moral not because it preaches virtue but because it depicts truthful growth.

Why We Reread

Cervantes’s endless play of perspectives and Proust’s endless introspection make rereading essential. First readings offer pleasure; rereading offers revelation. When you reread, you become what you behold. Consciousness deepens through circularity—the more you revisit, the more you expand. For Bloom, rereading is the soul’s exercise in immortality: you re-experience time until you become part of its memory, as Proust does in his masterpiece.

“You know what is going to happen, but how and why it happens can be increasingly a new realization.” —Harold Bloom

Reading novels, Bloom concludes, refines both imagination and empathy. The education of the heart lies in watching others change. Real reading does not make you good but makes you aware—and in awareness lies wisdom. The novelist teaches you that every life is tragicomedy; every consciousness incomplete; every rereading a resurrection.

In Bloom’s universe, drama is the stage of self-overhearing—the mirror where humanity listens to its own voice. Shakespeare’s Hamlet anchors this idea: the prince who speaks most beautifully also suffers most deeply from consciousness. To read plays, Bloom insists, is to watch thought become audible—the moment when language exposes the abyss beneath the self.

Hamlet’s Infinite Consciousness

Hamlet holds a mirror to the intellect itself. His problem is not indecision but lucidity—he thinks too well. Reading him, you realize that the mind’s expansion threatens action. His soliloquies are exercises in self-knowledge: “To be or not to be” is the ultimate reflection on how thought paralyses intent. Bloom calls Hamlet’s genius both tragic and prophetic: humanity’s discovery of inwardness itself. You read him not to solve his riddles but to feel the grandeur and danger of intelligence.

Hedda and Lady Bracknell: Post-Shakespearean Echoes

Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler fuses Cleopatra’s fatal charm and Iago’s manipulative wit. Her self-destruction becomes a critique of modern ennui—the boredom of intellect without purpose. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest answers Ibsen’s darkness with joyful nonsense. Lady Bracknell, Bloom suggests, echoes Falstaff’s language and Dr. Johnson’s pomposity to create playful wisdom. Both dramatists prove that theater after Shakespeare still measures humanity through irony—the art of saying one thing and meaning another.

The Reader as Performer

Bloom teaches that plays must be read as much as seen. The reader, not actor, completes the drama in thought. Reading Hamlet, Earnest, or Hedda Gabler silently, you become an audience of one—a participant in the world’s oldest dialogue between text and imagination. The act is not passive: you perform each speech in your mind until its irony dissolves into insight. Every rereading is rehearsal for consciousness.

“Ideally, one should read a Shakespearean play, watch a good performance of it, and then read it again.” —Harold Bloom

Drama, Bloom concludes, reveals humanity talking to itself—through wit, deceit, and revelation. You read plays to join that conversation: to overhear how language constructs identity and irony defends freedom. In the theater of reading, every voice becomes yours.

In his epilogue, Bloom turns philosophical, invoking Rabbi Tarphon’s ancient wisdom: “It is not necessary for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Reading, he says, is part of that infinite work—a lifelong labor of consciousness. You cannot finish it, because great literature never ends teaching; but you cannot abandon it either, because the mind without imagination decays. Tarphon’s paradox becomes Bloom’s final meditation on why reading matters at all in a secular age.

Reading as Endless Labor

The day is short and the work is great: that axiom describes the whole life of the reader. Like Shakespeare relinquishing his art in The Two Noble Kinsmen, every reader must bear herself “like the time”—laugh for what she lacks, be sorry for what she has, and continue reading while time allows. Bloom’s final reflections align Tarphon’s realism with Shakespeare’s equanimity: the work of self-cultivation never completes, but laughter and sorrow sustain it.

Reading Against Despair

Even in cultural decline, Bloom refuses despair. Literature, he claims, is civilization’s last defense against meaninglessness. Every rereading of Hamlet, Milton, or Emily Dickinson continues the work Tarphon described—a dialogue that cannot end. You read so that consciousness endures after you do. Reading becomes a moral of persistence: you will not complete the work, but the effort itself justifies being human.

Bearing Yourself Like the Time

Bloom closes with Shakespeare’s acceptance: 'Let us be thankful for that which is, and with you leave dispute that are above our question.' The truly educated reader bears herself like the time—grateful, ironical, aware of mortality yet unwilling to desist. Reading, then, is both resignation and rebellion: an affirmation that imagination can still resist oblivion.

“It is not necessary for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” —Rabbi Tarphon, as echoed by Harold Bloom

You finish Bloom’s How to Read and Why not with finality but with continuity—the sense that reading is life’s metaphoric labor, never done, always renewing. We keep reading, he tells us, not to fix the world but to keep ourselves awake within it: luminous, ironic, and free.