M. H. Abrams
M. H. Abrams
Meyer Howard "Mike" Abrams, usually cited as M. H. Abrams, was an American literary critic, known for works on romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp. Under Abrams's 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...
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth23 July 1912
thinking keys perception
Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.
views predictions decades
If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.
teaching effort way
At first, students tend to freeze at the first effort. The breakthrough comes when they realize that they can make it better - can identify what their purposes were and realize better ways to achieve those purposes.
thinking editing finals
I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable. It's not the final thing, it's the first thing, which may just be the suggestive, vague identification of something that you have to come back to and rewrite.
thinking desperation has-beens
I think most of the things I published have been published out of desperation, not because they were perfected.
mean poetry body
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
fashion thinking people
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.
people enjoy-life literature
Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable.
graduation ideas students
When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
book literature
Life without literature is a life reduced to penury.
interesting humanity humans
We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.