Unswerving.

When I was a small boy already addicted to doing nothing but reading poems in English, I was asked by an uncle who kept a candy store in Brooklyn what I intended to do to earn a living when I grew up. I said, I want to read poetry. He told me that there were professors of poetry at Harvard and Yale. That’s the first time I’d ever heard of those places or that there was such a thing as a professor of poetry. In my five- or six-year-old way I replied, I’m going to be a professor of poetry at Harvard or Yale. Of course, the joke is that three years ago I was simultaneously Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard and Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale! So in that sense I was prematurely overdetermined in profession. Sometimes I think that is the principal difference between my own work and the work of many other critics. I came to it very early, and I’ve been utterly unswerving. 

Harold Bloom

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