"It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable." -- M. H. Abrams
Meyer (Mike) Howard Abrams (born July 23, 1912) is an American literary critic, known for works on Romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp. Under Abrams' editorship, the Norton Anthology of English Literature became the standard text for undergraduate survey courses across the U.S. and a major trendsetter in literary canon formation.
"Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.""If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.""If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.""John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.""Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.""The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.""The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.""We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.""We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.""When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.""When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect."
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. He describes his work as solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment by establishing military codes that are highly audible and inventing selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background. In 1945 Abrams became a professor at Cornell University. As of March 4th, 2008, he was Class of 1916 Professor of English Emeritus there.
In a powerful contrast, Abrams shows that until the Romantics, literature was usually understood as amirror, reflecting the real world, in some kind of mimesis; but for the Romantics, writing was more like a lamp: the light of the writer's inner soul spilled out to illuminate the world.
