M. H. Abrams Quotes

• When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.

  M. H. Abrams

  Topics in History

  Tags in Leading, Spirit, Ideas

• 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.

  M. H. Abrams

  Topics in Youth

  Tags in Complain

• We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.

  M. H. Abrams

  Topics in Ability

  Tags in Invented, Voice

• The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.

  M. H. Abrams

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in President, Survive

• If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

  M. H. Abrams

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poetry

• We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.

  M. H. Abrams

  Topics in Humanity

• The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

  M. H. Abrams

  Tags in Enlightenment, Secular, Theological

• Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

  M. H. Abrams

  Tags in President

• John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

  M. H. Abrams

  Tags in President

• If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.

  M. H. Abrams

  Tags in President, Predictions

• Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.

  M. H. Abrams

  Topics in Work

M. H. Abrams (11)

Birth:	23rd July, 1912
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Critic

About

Meyer Howard Abrams is an American literary critic, known for works on Romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp. Under Abrams' 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.

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Deaths

• 1990 - Alan Perlis
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• 1984 - Samuel G. Engel