M.H. Abrams, Who Shaped Romantic Criticism, Dies at 102.pdf

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M.H. Abrams, 102, Dies; Shaped Romantic Criticismand Literary BibleM.H. Abrams, Who Shaped Romantic Criticism, Dies at 102

By WILLIAM GRIMES APRIL 22, 2015

M. H. Abrams, who transformed the study of Romanticism with the criticalhistories The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism, and whoedited the first seven editions of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, avirtual Bible in literature survey courses, died on Tuesday in Ithaca, N.Y. He was102.

Cornell University, where he taught for nearly 40 years, announced his deathon Wednesday.

On its publication in 1953, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory andthe Critical Tradition was greeted as an instant classic. With fluid ease, ProfessorAbrams distilled the arguments of philosophers and critics from ancient Greeceonward as he delineated a radical shift in aesthetics in the early 19th century, set inmotion by poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge.

The change was expressed by several ruling images, or constitutivemetaphors, as Professor Abrams called them, chiefly the mirror and the lamp. Forneoclassical writers like Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, writing in the 18thcentury, the essence of poetic creation was mimetic, or imitative. In Shakespearesfamous phrase, the poet held the mirror up to nature.

The Romantics, by contrast, thought of the poet as a lamp, illuminated by aninner fire of spontaneously ignited feeling that made nature visible. By sifting



through centuries of critical thought, Professor Abrams documented a remarkableturn in sensibility, as writers began thinking of poetry in a new way, invoking themetaphors of plants, burbling fountains or flowing streams to explain the creativeprocess.

The Mirror and the Lamp won the Christian Gauss Award, awarded by PhiBeta Kappa, in 1954. In 1957, 25o critics and scholars surveyed by ColumbiaUniversity voted it one of the five books of the previous 30 years that hadcontributed most to the understanding of literature. The other four were TheGreat Chain of Being, by Arthur Lovejoy, The Allegory of Love, by C. S. Lewis,American Renaissance, by F. O. Matthiessen, and the collected essays of T. S.Eliot.

In a 2011 interview, the literary scholar Harold Bloom, who studied withProfessor Abrams as an undergraduate, said that The Mirror and the Lamp wasa remarkable piece of critical and literary history that describes the transitionfrom mimetic theories of representation to Romantic ideas of creation what onemight call mystical or visionary theories.

It remains a perpetually useful book, he said.Meyer Howard Abrams, known as Mike, was born on July 23, 1912, in Long

Branch, N.J., where his father painted houses and later opened a paint andwallpaper store.

He attended Harvard, where he earned a bachelors degree in English in 1934.His senior thesis, devoted to the Romantics, was published the same year byHarvard University Press as The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions onthe Works of De Quincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson and Coleridge.

After studying at Cambridge with the literary critic I. A. Richards, ProfessorAbrams returned to Harvard, where he received a masters degree in 1937 and aPh.D. in 1940. His dissertation was an early version of The Mirror and the Lamp.

In 1937 he married Ruth Gaynes, who died in 2008. He is survived by his twodaughters, Jane Brennan and Judith Abrams; two grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

During World War II, Professor Abrams worked at the psychoacousticslaboratory at Harvard, developing military codes that could be easily understood



against a background noise of engines and gunfire. He was offered a teachingposition at Cornell in 1945 and remained there until his retirement in 1983. Hisnotable students included the novelist Thomas Pynchon and the critic andeducational theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr.

With The Mirror and the Lamp, Professor Abrams almost single-handedlyconferred legitimacy on the study of Romantic poetry, which had been held in lowregard by the followers of New Criticism, then in its ascendancy. The critic WayneC. Booth, writing for the collection High Romantic Argument: Essays for M. H.Abrams (1981), called Professor Abrams the best historian of ideas, as ideasrelate to literature and literary criticism, that the world has ever known.

Professor Abrams expressed some surprise at the books enduring success. Ihad no reason to expect in 1953 that it would appeal to more than a specializedgroup interested in literary criticism, he told The Cornell Chronicle in 1999. Ithink one of the reasons why its been of interest to a broad spectrum of readers isbecause one of its emphases was on the role of metaphor in steering humanthinking. It was a very early book to insist on the role of metaphors in cognition, aswell as in imaginative literature to claim that key metaphors help determinewhat and how we perceive and how we think about perceptions.

Although he considered Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolutionin Romantic Literature (1971) his most important book, it was published in a verydifferent critical climate than The Mirror and the Lamp was. Using key texts byWordsworth as his starting point, Professor Abrams examined the works ofGerman philosophers and English poets to document the transformation oftraditional Judeo-Christian religious ideas into poetic theory in the Romanticperiod, when art was called upon to perform many of the spiritual functions ofreligion.

The champions of poststructuralism, which was gaining ground rapidly in theacademy, regarded Professor Abrams as almost painfully old-fashioned, and hefound himself squaring off against critics, notably J. Hillis Miller, who disputed thevery premises upon which he approached the history of ideas. The booknevertheless remains a seminal text on the Romantic movement.

In addition to A Glossary of Literary Terms (1957), a standard work for



undergraduates that has gone through many editions, Professor Abrams wroteThe Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (1984) and DoingThings With Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory (1989). He edited ThePoetry of Pope (1954), Literature and Belief (1957) English Romantic Poets:Modern Essays in Criticism (1960) and Wordsworth: A Collection of CriticalEssays (1972).

In 2012, his hundredth year, Norton published his essay collection TheFourth Dimension of a Poem.

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Professor Abrams theNational Humanities Medal in 2013 for expanding our perceptions of theRomantic tradition and broadening the study of literature. President Obamapresented the medal at a ceremony at the White House last July.

Professor Abrams was best known to generations of undergraduate students asthe general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, a monumentalwork first published in 1962. In that role, he selected and supervised a team of sixscholars, each responsible for a specific period of English literature. He took on thejob of developing the section on Romanticism. More than 8 million copies of theanthology had been printed by 2006, when the eighth edition came out. (A ninthedition was published in 2012.)

Unlike previous anthologies, which presented snippets of the works selectedby the editorial team, The Norton Anthology included the complete textswhenever possible. In the case of long works like The Canterbury Tales orParadise Lost, extensive passages were included. Throughout, Professor Abramsinsisted on informative introductions written with scholarly authority, whileproviding explanatory footnotes geared to the undergraduate level. For the eighthedition, the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt took over as general editor.

I thought that wed get the anthology done in about a year, and the thingwould have fair sales for about a decade or so, Professor Abrams told the CornellAlumni Magazine in 2006. Instead of a year, it took four years, and instead oflasting a decade, it seems to have become eternal.

He was gratified by the works staying power. Interviewed by The New YorkTimes Book Review in 2012 on the occasion of the anthologys 50th anniversary, he



said, One of the pleasures of being an editor of the anthology is to meet middle-aged people who say: I still have the Norton Anthology that I used 20 years ago. Ihave it at my beds head, and I read it at night, and I enjoy it. A version of this article appears in print on April 23, 2015, on page A25 of the New York edition with theheadline: M.H. Abrams, Professor Who Shaped the Study of Romanticism, Dies at 102.

2015 The New York Times Company

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M.H. Abrams, Who Shaped Romantic Criticism, Dies at 102.pdf