In memoriam of M.H. Abrams

My first encounter with M.H. Abrams involved a bicycle. In a Beckettian scene in Goldwin Smith Hall at Cornell, I stopped a gentleman in shorts one spring morning with a bicycle. “Excuse me, do you know a Professor Abrams?” Removing a pipe from his mouth, he smiled and said “Follow me.” I did, and he stopped at an office door, asked me to hold the bike, fished out a key, and directed me to bring the bike in and sit down. “But what about Professor Abrams? I’m to be his new assistant,” I added nervously. The cyclist sat down among the piles of books, relit his pipe, and said through a grin, “Let’s get started.”

From that moment on, I learned to appreciate the modesty, acuity, and gentle humor of Mike Abrams. For the next two years, I was his student and research assistant, startled almost every day by his casual grasp of German philosophy, Coleridgian aesthetics, and Shelleyian imagery. Without lecturing or imposing, he transferred his understanding of these figures in a subtle but persuasive manner that glided over his years of deep study and complex reasoning. He often gave the impression that he had just picked up Hegel for amusement, as he pointed out contradictions in his argument or flaws in his judgment of aesthetic perception. He just as lightly pointed out major flaws in one’s writing or how one overlooked a critical point in an argument. Perspicacity was a word he rarely used but always demonstrated.

And then there was Harold Bloom, his former student. One afternoon he sat in on our Romantics seminar. Before Mike could even introduce him, Bloom grabbed a seemingly unread copy of Visionary Company from the table. “Mike,” he cried, “you didn’t even open the book and I dedicated it to you!” “Not quite right, Harold,” Abrams calmly answered, as he flipped through several pages, pointing out his barely visible “NB” marks in pencil. “But there are only two on this page,” Bloom complained. In an instant, Abrams whipped out his pencil and added two more. “That’s more like it,” Bloom said.

Abrams was equally responsive when writing. Having drafted a section of Natural Supernaturalism, he startled me by asking me to review it, not only for its accuracy but style. This 550 page work, subtitled Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, covered philosophy, religion, literature, and history from 1789 to 1835. Not only the range but the clarity of thought expressed his vision that the central Romantic ideas were, in fact, secularized forms of traditional theological concepts. Kant and Hegel vie with Saint Augustine and Gerrard Winstanley, a 17^th-century visionary pamphleteer, in understanding Romantic self-perception. But while the book was shattering in its scope, he shared its learning with restraint. Combined with The Mirror and The Lamp, where he often pointed to sections he might have expanded or revised, the volumes redefined our understanding and study of Romanticism.

Mike published his first book, The Milk of Paradise—concerning opium and the Romantic imagination—at age 22 and published one almost every decade of his life. His last was a collection entitled The Fourth Dimensions of a Poem, coinciding with his 100^th birthday. In an interview at that time, he recalled hearing T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and e.e. cummings read, as well as Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas. Poetry and literature, for him, were teeming with life and intensity, which he attempted to convey in an anthology that generations of English majors in North America could barely carry: the two-volume The Norton Anthology of English Literature, which he conceived and edited through seven editions. “If you can actually lug it around, you’ll graduate,” many quipped.

During WWII, Mike worked in a secret lab at Harvard devising better communication techniques for troops on the frontlines. His qualifications for the job included an interest in psychology and phonetics, but his commitment to communicating the value and joy of literature never stopped.

Mike’s legacy for his students was multifaceted, beginning with a persistent engagement with intellectual history and a dissemination of ideas that made you want to learn. This was clear in the opening pages of The Mirror and The Lamp, where he offered a simple framework for the comparison of aesthetic theories. A diagram placed a work in the center of a triangle with the universe above it, the artist on the lower left, and the audience on the lower right. The problem, he remarked, is that theories orient themselves to only one element, not all. But finding the critical orientation of a theory is only the beginning of an “adequate analysis,” he added.

Context was another concern of Abrams. You couldn’t understand Wordsworth without knowing the French Revolution. You couldn’t understand the revolution unless you read Carlyle. You couldn’t understand Carlyle until you read Gibbon. And he would often repeat that good criticism required “a keen eye for the obvious.”

Mike, of course, seemed to have mastered it all but never in an imposing manner. In The Mirror and The Lamp, he argued that the test of a poem was no longer “Is it true to nature?” but “Is it sincere? Is it genuine?” He was always genuine, framed by an openness and generosity of learning, eagerly inviting his students to follow him on his unfolding intellectual journey. The ideas and concepts were there for all of us to pick up. Most of us are still cycling after him.

 Image Credit: “Souvenir from a bike ride” by Ulises Santamaria . CC BY NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.