“Only rarely can poetry aid us in communing with others; that is a beautiful idealism, except at certain strange moments, like the instant of falling in love. Solitude is the more frequent mark of our condition; how shall we people that solitude? Poems can help us to speak to ourselves more clearly and more fully, and to overhearthat speaking. Shakespeare is the largest master of such overhearing; his women and men are our forerunners, as they are also of Tennyson’s Ulysses. We speak to an otherness in ourselves, or to what may be best and oldest in ourselves. We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strange than otherwise we could hope to find.”

— Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why