M. H. ABRAMS, who died at age 102 in April, was an almost mythical figure in literary studies, and not just because he remained intellectually active to the end (Norton published his The Fourth Dimension of a Poem in his one-hundredth year). He was the inventor and general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, the first and dominant anthology presenting the literary canon, and for nearly fifty years he presided over the gradual expansion of that canon, adding more women and minority authors in every edition.
He was also, as Wayne Booth hyperbolically put it, “the best historian of ideas, as ideas relate to literature and literary criticism, that the world has known.” His Natural Supernaturalism (1973) is a grand synthesis of Romantic literature and philosophy, exploring in particular the secularization of structures of religious thought as an animating force in nineteenth-century culture. The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), his most famous book, was a groundbreaking study of conceptions of literature and the shift from theories of literature as mimesis to literature as expression. It presented itself as the history of an intellectual transformation, but, more importantly, in outlining different possible theories of literature, for the first time it made the study of literary theory and theories an explicit topic of academic inquiry. With its eminently respectable roots, The Mirror and the Lamp worked to validate the study of critical theory as central to the humanities.
Another contribution to critical theory is his A Glossary of Literary Terms, which he continued to edit and augment into his nineties; its modest title conceals succinct essays on all the topics germane to thinking about literature and culture. Unfortunately, the publisher, taking this as a textbook with a captive market, has priced it so exorbitantly that few people buy it. Abrams made his reputation as an intellectual historian, concentrating on Romantic literature, critical thought, and philosophy, but in his nineties he developed a new interest in the acoustic aspects of poems and how a reader’s experience of articulating the poem’s sounds contributes to its effects. He called this “the fourth dimension of a poem” and beautifully performs these effects in readings available on YouTube.
The Mirror and the Lamp opens with this sentence: “The development of literary theory in the lifetime of Coleridge was to a surprising extent the making of the modern critical mind.” “Surprising” because he argues that critical theories we had thought of as post-Romantic, if not anti-Romantic, have their roots in the Romantic period. Analyzing critical theories as networks of metaphors—the work of art as an organism, for instance—he set the stage for the deconstructive analysis of the assumptions sedimented in the figurative logic of intellectual systems, though he himself would only in jest acknowledge such monstrous progeny. Declaring himself an “unreconstructed humanist,” he resisted the explorations of structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, new historicism, and deconstruction, which decline to make the individual subject an origin but treat subjects as effects of impersonal forces that operate through them.
But while he might have done battle with various isms in essays for the public arena, at home at Cornell, where he spent his entire teaching career, he was a benign figure, a supporter even of colleagues like me who were championing such things as structuralism and deconstruction, and he did not, for instance, oppose my succeeding him as the Class of 1916 Professor of English, a chair on which he had conferred great distinction.
Though one of the preeminent critics of the century, he had none of the qualities we associate with academic superstars. He did not fly around the country speaking at conferences or in prestigious lecture series; he declined visiting professorships, preferring to remain at home in Ithaca. He did not seek academic power, either within the university or in professional organizations. He did not want a center of some sort to direct, though he worked to help found the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. He was never president of anything.
He was a great supporter of Cornell sports, especially the football team, and in his nineties was made honorary co-captain and allowed to call the toss of the coin at homecoming. He claimed never to have missed a home game until his one-hundredth year. This unreconstructed humanist was an incurable optimist, not only about the prospects of Cornell football but also about Ithaca weather. We were delighted that he was able to travel to Washington in 2014 to receive the National Humanities Medal from President Obama.
Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University and the author of Structuralist Poetics (1975), On Deconstruction (1983), and of Theory of the Lyric (June 2015).
