M. H. Abrams (1912–2015)
Author of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1
About the Author
M. H. Abrams, 1912 - 2015 Meyer Howard Abrams was born in Long Branch, New Jersey on July 23, 1912. He received a B.A. in English from Harvard University in 1934. He won a Henry fellowship to Cambridge University in 1935. He returned to Harvard University, where he received a Masters' degree in show more 1937 and a Ph. D. in 1940. He joined the Cornell University faculty in 1945 and taught a popular introductory survey class. While at Cornell in the 1950s, he was asked by publisher W. W. Norton to lead a team of editors compiling excerpts of vital English works. The first edition of the Norton Anthology came out in 1962. Abrams stayed on through seven editions. He was also the author of a popular Glossary of Literary Terms, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, Natural Supernaturalism, The Milk of Paradise, and the essay collection The Fourth Dimension of a Poem. In 2014, he received a National Arts Medal for "expanding our perceptions of the Romantic tradition and broadening the study of literature." He died on April 21, 2015 at the age of 102. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Works by M. H. Abrams
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th Edition, Volume 2 (1986) — Editor — 955 copies, 1 review
The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors {generic} (1975) — Editor — 811 copies, 4 reviews
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th Edition, Volume 2 (1993) — Editor — 715 copies, 2 reviews
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th Edition, Volume 1 (1993) — Editor — 448 copies, 4 reviews
Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971) 283 copies, 1 review
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 4th Edition, Volume 2 (1979) — Editor — 269 copies, 1 review
The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Ninth Edition) (Vol. Package 1: Volumes A, B, C) (2012) 136 copies
The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Ninth Edition) (Vol. Package 2: Volumes D, E, F) (2012) 87 copies
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2 {generic} (1962) — Editor — 77 copies, 1 review
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Major Authors (Ninth Edition) (Vol. 2) (2013) 31 copies
The Milk of Paradise The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of DeQuincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge (1970) 22 copies
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. B: The Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century and After (2006) 20 copies
The Norton Anthology of English Literature Sixth Edition volumes 1 and 2 (1993) — Editor — 13 copies
Norton Anthology of English Literature 12 copies
The Norton Anthology of English Literature With Jane Eyre (Norton Anthology of English Literature) (1993) 9 copies
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Major Authors: Volumes A & B, Seventh Edition (with Media Companion) 6 copies, 1 review
ABRAMS NORTON ANTH 3ED 5 copies
A HANDBOOK OF LITERARY TERMS 2 copies
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume A and B: The Middle Ages through the Twentieth Century and After (2006) 2 copies
The Norton Anthology of M.H. Abrams 2 copies
The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Ninth Edition) (Vol. F)-The Twentieth Century and After 1 copy
The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Ninth Edition) (Vol. E) by M. H. Abrams (2012-02-07) (2012) 1 copy
The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Ninth Edition) (Vol. D) by M. H. Abrams (2012-02-08) 1 copy
Associated Works
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th Edition, Volume A (2005) — Editor, some editions — 516 copies, 1 review
Shelley's Poetry and Prose [Norton Critical Edition, 1st ed.] (1977) — Contributor — 308 copies, 2 reviews
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th Edition, Volume C (2012) — Editor, some editions — 249 copies
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th Edition, Volume F (2012) — Editor, some editions — 198 copies
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th Edition, Volume E (2012) — Editor, some editions — 190 copies
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th Edition, Volume D (2012) — Editor, some editions — 130 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Abrams, M. H.
- Legal name
- Abrams, Meyer Howard
- Other names
- Abrams, Mike
- Birthdate
- 1912-07-23
- Date of death
- 2015-04-21
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Harvard University (BA | 1934)
Harvard University (MA | 1937)
Harvard University (PhD | 1940)
Magdalen College, University of Cambridge - Occupations
- literary critic
professor
editor - Organizations
- Cornell University
- Awards and honors
- American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award (Literature, 1990)
American Academy of Arts and Letters (Literature, 2001)
National Humanities Medal (2013) - Short biography
- Abrams was born in a Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey. The son of a house painter and the first in his family to go to college, he entered Harvard University as an undergraduate in 1930. He went into English because, he says, "there weren't jobs in any other profession, so I thought I might as well enjoy starving, instead of starving while doing something I didn't enjoy." After earning his baccalaureate in 1934, Abrams won a Henry fellowship to the University of Cambridge, where his tutor was I.A. Richards. He returned to Harvard for graduate school in 1935 and received his Masters' degree in 1937 and his PhD in 1940. During World War II, he served at the Psycho-Acoustics Laboratory at Harvard. Abrams wrote his first book, The Milk of Paradise: The Effects of Opium Visions on the Works of De Quincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge (1934), while an undergraduate. With his second work, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953), an expanded version of his Ph.D. dissertation, he joined the front rank of Romantic-literature scholars. In 1945 Abrams became a professor at Cornell University. As of March 4th, 2008, he was Class of 1916 Professor of English Emeritus there.
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Long Branch, New Jersey, USA
- Places of residence
- Long Branch, New Jersey, USA (birth)
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK
Ithaca, New York, USA
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Los Angeles, California, USA (show all 7)
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada - Place of death
- Ithaca, New York, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
This book was a challenging read. No doubt this is because it is a doctoral dissertation outside of my field. But not outside of my interest, so I stuck with it. Abrams draws out what was new in Romantic literary criticism by situating it in the long tradition stretching back to Plato and Aristotle. The title is shorthand for controlling metaphors of what literature should aim at, whether to be a mirror of the real world (that is, nature) or whether it should illuminate it. That seems show more reasonable, yet it turns out to be not so simple. There were other aims throughout history, including moral improvement (an aim not all Romantic critics disavowed, even though they foreswore being didactic) and turning the mirror from the outside world to the author.
Along the way, there are many names (thankfully most familiar to me), quotations, and endnotes. I had to reread sentences more than once after realizing I had lost the thread. Nevertheless, I’m glad I stuck with it. Not only for the general reason that it’s always good to read something that stretches you from time to time but also for the many things I learned that can help me make better sense of the poetry not only of the Romantic period but also of the neo-classical age that preceded it (I’ve always had a hard time understanding, much less enjoying, Pope, for instance).
When this book appeared, its primary audience would have been grad students starting out. Of course, that was seventy years ago, and while I’m sure it was compulsory reading for at least a generation, I wouldn’t be surprised if it has slipped out of the curriculum since. Too bad. And don’t be scared off because it was a dissertation: it’s much better written than most. show less
Along the way, there are many names (thankfully most familiar to me), quotations, and endnotes. I had to reread sentences more than once after realizing I had lost the thread. Nevertheless, I’m glad I stuck with it. Not only for the general reason that it’s always good to read something that stretches you from time to time but also for the many things I learned that can help me make better sense of the poetry not only of the Romantic period but also of the neo-classical age that preceded it (I’ve always had a hard time understanding, much less enjoying, Pope, for instance).
When this book appeared, its primary audience would have been grad students starting out. Of course, that was seventy years ago, and while I’m sure it was compulsory reading for at least a generation, I wouldn’t be surprised if it has slipped out of the curriculum since. Too bad. And don’t be scared off because it was a dissertation: it’s much better written than most. show less
After reading Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp, I was eager to read more works by him. As our library had Natural Supernaturalism available, I borrowed the book a few months ago, but only got around to reading it last month. This book is just as good as The Mirror and the Lamp, if not better. It displays Abrams’s tremendous erudition, but it seems more original than The Mirror and the Lamp, as Abrams does not quote quite as extensively in this book as in the previous one. Although this show more is definitely an academic book, it refrains from unnecessary jargon – yes, there are some complicated terms, but Abrams always explains things that could be difficult to grasp. The book covers most of the English Romantic poets (with the exception of Byron), with whom I am fairly familiar. Abrams also deals with Romanticism as it was constellated in the German states, an aspect of the book with which I was much less familiar. Abrams also pulls his argument through to modern times (well, the 1970’s) and looks at the influence of Romanticism on some modern writers.
It would be difficult to go through everything this book covers, but I will attempt to explicate the main points of the book (as I remember them from one reading). As an overarching structure for his argument, Abrams refers constantly to Wordsworth’s program for poetry, as set out in the ‘Prospectus’ part of the preface to his The Excursion. As Abrams says in his preface, the ‘title, Natural Supernaturalism, indicates that his recurrent, but far from exclusive, concern will be with the secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking.’ Abrams’s argument is that the Romantics in both England and Germany – strongly Protestant states – adopted and reworked Biblical exegesis and theodicy into a secular understanding of humanity and Nature. This, although a sudden break with tradition, had a long period of fruition, as Abrams proves by going back to the Biblical text, and then following this development through time. On the way, Abrams discusses Christian psycho-biography (e.g. Augustine’s Confessions), the influence of pagan and Christian neoplatonism, and the Western esoteric tradition. All of these traditions lead, according to Abrams, to the new conception of man and nature found in the writings of the Romantics.
I enjoyed all of these excursions into Western intellectual history. I did, however, find the section on German Romanticism hard-going. This is mostly because I have not read any of the poets even in translation – these include Schiller, Hölderlin, Goethe, and Novalis. I am going to read Goethe’s Faust next year, but for now, these poets are an undiscovered country to me. I have, however, read some Hegel before – unfortunately. He is obviously a very original philosopher, but the obscurity of his style would give James Joyce in finest fettle a run for his money. Even Abrams cannot make him seem worthwhile to me: it still seems like a lot of philoso-babble to me, and I did not enjoy this part of the book.
I was on firmer ground with the next part of the book, which deals with the changing Romantic movement in English literature, starting with William Blake and ending with D.H. Lawrence. Abrams focuses on what he calls ‘The Circuitous Journey’ in these writers’ works – the idea that a journey has to be made in order to return to where one started, but with greater insight and on a higher level. This is often represented by the Ouroboros: a snake with its tail in its mouth. Obviously, I am simplifying Abrams’s argument greatly – he has three sections of the book dedicated to this topic. It was very interesting to see how Abrams traces his argument from Blake’s mystical writings to Eliot’s recurring moments in the Four Quartets. These moments are further examined in section on Wordsworth’s so-called ‘spots of time’, where Abrams moves from the Romantics all the way to the Modernists, including Joyce, and even further, up to the Beatniks.
This book, although not written specifically to inspire, did engender feelings of hope and optimism in me. Despite Abrams’s pessimism concerning modern culture, he seems to say something hopeful concerning culture and art: in his last chapter, titled ‘The Eagle and the Abyss’, he relates how many writers come to a seeming abyss, which seems impossible to cross. However, there is always the hope of spotting an eagle soaring across this divide. This is the triumph of epiphany and sublime vision, which only art can achieve. As Abrams quotes Wallace Stevens as saying:
The astral and Shelleyan lights are not going to alter the structure of nature. Apples will always be apples, and whoever is a ploughman hereafter will be what the ploughman has always been. For all that, the astral and Shelleyan will have transformed the world.
Nothing can better explain the true usefulness of art in its use-lessness. show less
It would be difficult to go through everything this book covers, but I will attempt to explicate the main points of the book (as I remember them from one reading). As an overarching structure for his argument, Abrams refers constantly to Wordsworth’s program for poetry, as set out in the ‘Prospectus’ part of the preface to his The Excursion. As Abrams says in his preface, the ‘title, Natural Supernaturalism, indicates that his recurrent, but far from exclusive, concern will be with the secularization of inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking.’ Abrams’s argument is that the Romantics in both England and Germany – strongly Protestant states – adopted and reworked Biblical exegesis and theodicy into a secular understanding of humanity and Nature. This, although a sudden break with tradition, had a long period of fruition, as Abrams proves by going back to the Biblical text, and then following this development through time. On the way, Abrams discusses Christian psycho-biography (e.g. Augustine’s Confessions), the influence of pagan and Christian neoplatonism, and the Western esoteric tradition. All of these traditions lead, according to Abrams, to the new conception of man and nature found in the writings of the Romantics.
I enjoyed all of these excursions into Western intellectual history. I did, however, find the section on German Romanticism hard-going. This is mostly because I have not read any of the poets even in translation – these include Schiller, Hölderlin, Goethe, and Novalis. I am going to read Goethe’s Faust next year, but for now, these poets are an undiscovered country to me. I have, however, read some Hegel before – unfortunately. He is obviously a very original philosopher, but the obscurity of his style would give James Joyce in finest fettle a run for his money. Even Abrams cannot make him seem worthwhile to me: it still seems like a lot of philoso-babble to me, and I did not enjoy this part of the book.
I was on firmer ground with the next part of the book, which deals with the changing Romantic movement in English literature, starting with William Blake and ending with D.H. Lawrence. Abrams focuses on what he calls ‘The Circuitous Journey’ in these writers’ works – the idea that a journey has to be made in order to return to where one started, but with greater insight and on a higher level. This is often represented by the Ouroboros: a snake with its tail in its mouth. Obviously, I am simplifying Abrams’s argument greatly – he has three sections of the book dedicated to this topic. It was very interesting to see how Abrams traces his argument from Blake’s mystical writings to Eliot’s recurring moments in the Four Quartets. These moments are further examined in section on Wordsworth’s so-called ‘spots of time’, where Abrams moves from the Romantics all the way to the Modernists, including Joyce, and even further, up to the Beatniks.
This book, although not written specifically to inspire, did engender feelings of hope and optimism in me. Despite Abrams’s pessimism concerning modern culture, he seems to say something hopeful concerning culture and art: in his last chapter, titled ‘The Eagle and the Abyss’, he relates how many writers come to a seeming abyss, which seems impossible to cross. However, there is always the hope of spotting an eagle soaring across this divide. This is the triumph of epiphany and sublime vision, which only art can achieve. As Abrams quotes Wallace Stevens as saying:
The astral and Shelleyan lights are not going to alter the structure of nature. Apples will always be apples, and whoever is a ploughman hereafter will be what the ploughman has always been. For all that, the astral and Shelleyan will have transformed the world.
Nothing can better explain the true usefulness of art in its use-lessness. show less
I've read snatches from this book before for undergraduate essays, but never the whole text. And, I must say, I now feel very foolish for not having read the whole thing cover-to-cover previously. M.H. Abrams, the well-known critic and editor of various Norton Anthologies and Literary Glossaries, attempts in this book to convey the tenets of Romantic theory and how these were shaped by the critical western tradition from Plato up to the nineteenth century. His prose is always succinct and show more calculated, with little extraneous emotionalism or attempts at bravura criticism. Although I do not really have a problem with more 'subjective' criticism (and I use that term advisedly, as Abrams has a whole section in which he delineates the ascendancy of the terms 'subjective' and 'objective' in the critical lexicon) I did find Abrams's restraint refreshing.
Most of the book is not, in fact, Abrams's own criticism, but rather an exposition of the various streams of literary criticism during the Romantic period, and how these evolved from ancient times. Abrams obviously did extensive (and by extensive, I mean panoptic) research during the writing of this book. He often quotes the usual proponents of Romantic critical theory, such as Coleridge, Hazlitt, De Quincey, etc., but he also digs up critics that have fallen through the cracks of history. If there is anything bravura about Abrams's approach, it is this bringing to light of unknown and forgotten literary theorists and commentators.
I did feel that Abrams held back on his own opinions a little too much in the book, which makes it a bit bloodless. I'm not, however, saying that he should have made it a personal document, or a panegyric to any one critic or school of criticism. God knows we have enough of those. I'm just saying that it would not have hurt to add some more personal appraisals, perhaps as a coda or so. Obviously, Abrams does find some joy in Romanticism and the critical tradition, or he would not have written the book.
I'll end with one of my favourite quotations from the book. It is from the last subsection of the book, The Use of Romantic Poetry, in the chapter, Science and Poetry in Romantic Criticism. Here is Percy Bysshe Shelley giving what Abrams calls a 'classic indictment of our technological, material, and acquisitive society.' It is from Shelley's 'Defence of Poetry':
The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave... The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature.
Whether one agrees with Shelley's sad indictment of modern material man, one can surely not deny that it is cogently, even beautifully, expressed. For me, it is a motto that I have transcribed deep in my own heart. show less
Most of the book is not, in fact, Abrams's own criticism, but rather an exposition of the various streams of literary criticism during the Romantic period, and how these evolved from ancient times. Abrams obviously did extensive (and by extensive, I mean panoptic) research during the writing of this book. He often quotes the usual proponents of Romantic critical theory, such as Coleridge, Hazlitt, De Quincey, etc., but he also digs up critics that have fallen through the cracks of history. If there is anything bravura about Abrams's approach, it is this bringing to light of unknown and forgotten literary theorists and commentators.
I did feel that Abrams held back on his own opinions a little too much in the book, which makes it a bit bloodless. I'm not, however, saying that he should have made it a personal document, or a panegyric to any one critic or school of criticism. God knows we have enough of those. I'm just saying that it would not have hurt to add some more personal appraisals, perhaps as a coda or so. Obviously, Abrams does find some joy in Romanticism and the critical tradition, or he would not have written the book.
I'll end with one of my favourite quotations from the book. It is from the last subsection of the book, The Use of Romantic Poetry, in the chapter, Science and Poetry in Romantic Criticism. Here is Percy Bysshe Shelley giving what Abrams calls a 'classic indictment of our technological, material, and acquisitive society.' It is from Shelley's 'Defence of Poetry':
The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave... The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature.
Whether one agrees with Shelley's sad indictment of modern material man, one can surely not deny that it is cogently, even beautifully, expressed. For me, it is a motto that I have transcribed deep in my own heart. show less
The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Galaxy Books) by Meyer H. Abrams
A tough one to rate on the star system, unfortunately, since it's very uneven. The early chapters, up to his precis of Wordsworth and especially Coleridge are excellent- he explains how and why Romantic criticism came to be what it is, by putting it into the context of earlier critics. The second half, though, isn't nearly as impressive. It's good intellectual history, I guess, in the 'x thought y' mode. But there's much less convincing analysis of the 'x thought y because of z' mode, and show more really, that's much more important.
I was also hoping for something a bit less dense when I started, which might have biased me a bit, and there's nothing more fatuous than the psychology of art, from the earliest writers through to the neuro-aestheticians of our time. So that didn't help the middle two chapters. On the other hand, better this than the books that were being written twenty years later, since Abrams was still under the impression that you have to know about something before writing theory about that thing, so this book will help you learn about the Romantics and not about, say, a deconstructivist post-feminist anti-Marxist stance with some vague connection to Shelley. Thumbs up for that. show less
I was also hoping for something a bit less dense when I started, which might have biased me a bit, and there's nothing more fatuous than the psychology of art, from the earliest writers through to the neuro-aestheticians of our time. So that didn't help the middle two chapters. On the other hand, better this than the books that were being written twenty years later, since Abrams was still under the impression that you have to know about something before writing theory about that thing, so this book will help you learn about the Romantics and not about, say, a deconstructivist post-feminist anti-Marxist stance with some vague connection to Shelley. Thumbs up for that. show less
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