"Creative reading"
"I take from Emerson also my fourth principle of reading: One must be an inventor to read well. 'Creative reading' in Emerson's sense I once named as 'misreading,' a word that persuaded opponents that I suffered from involuntary dyslexia. The ruin or blank that they see when they look at a poem is in their own eye. Self-trust is not an endowment, but is the Second Birth of the mind, which cannot come without years of deep reading. There are no absolute standards for the aesthetic. If you wish to maintain that Shakespeare's ascendancy was a product of colonialism, then who will bother to confute you? Shakespeare after four centuries is more persuasive than ever he was before; they will perform him in outer space, and on other worlds, if those worlds are reached."
Harold Bloom
How to Read and Why
First principle.
Second principle.
Third principle.
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