Meyer Howard Abrams (born July 23, 1912) is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 literary critic, known for works on Romanticism

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp. Under Abrams' editorship, the Norton Anthology of English Literature

Norton Anthology of English Literature

The Norton Anthology of English Literature is an anthology of English literature published by the W. W. Norton & Company. It has gone through eight editions since its inception in 1962; it is the publisher's best-selling anthology, with some eight million copies in print. The influential critic...

became the standard text for undergraduate survey courses across the U.S. and a major trendsetter in literary canon formation.

Life

Abrams was born in a Jewish

Jews

The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...

 family in Long Branch, New Jersey

Long Branch, New Jersey

Long Branch is a city in Monmouth County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city population was 30,719.Long Branch was formed on April 11, 1867, as the Long Branch Commission, from portions of Ocean Township...

. The son of a house painter and the first in his family to go to college, he entered Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 as an undergraduate in 1930. He went into English

English literature

English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

 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

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

, 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

PHD

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 in 1940. During World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, 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

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

. The literary critics Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...

 and E. D. Hirsch were among his students. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963. As of March 4, 2008, he was Class of 1916 Professor of English Emeritus there.

The Mirror and the Lamp

In a powerful contrast, Abrams shows that until the Romantics, literature was usually understood as a mirror, 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.

Classification of literary theories

Literary theories, Abrams argues, can be divided into four main groups:

• Mimetic Theories (interested in the relationship between the Work and the Universe)
• Pragmatic Theories (interested in the relationship between the Work and the Audience)
• Expressive Theories (interested in the relationship between the Work and the Artist)
• Objective Theories (interested in close reading of the Work)

Works

• The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953) ISBN 978-0-19-501471-6
• The Poetry of Pope: a selection (1954) ISBN 978-0-88295-067-9
• Literature and Belief: English Institute essays, 1957. (1957) editor ISBN 978-0-231-02278-1
• A Glossary of Literary Terms (1957; 9th ed. 2009) ISBN 978-1413033908
• English Romantic Poets: modern essays in criticism (1960) ISBN 978-0-19-501946-9
• Norton Anthology of English Literature
  Norton Anthology of English Literature
  The Norton Anthology of English Literature is an anthology of English literature published by the W. W. Norton & Company. It has gone through eight editions since its inception in 1962; it is the publisher's best-selling anthology, with some eight million copies in print. The influential critic...
  
  (1962) founding editor, many later editions
• The Milk of Paradise: the effect of opium visions on the works of DeQuincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge (1970) ISBN 978-0-374-90028-1
• Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1973) ISBN 978-0393006094
• The Correspondent Breeze: essays on English Romanticism (1984) ISBN 978-0-393-30340-7
• Doing Things with Texts: essays in criticism and critical theory (1989) ISBN 978-0-393-02713-6

External links

• "The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism" entry Short informative text on him.
• M.H. Abrams reads poetry aloud at the National Humanities Center