M.H. Abrams Quotes

Life without literature is a life reduced to penury.

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

I was never a monist - always a diversitarian.

The Romantics were whipping boys of the New Criticism, but they appealed to me anyway. I was recalcitrant. It was clear to me that they had thought innovatively.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing - by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

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

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

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

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.

I think most of the things I published have been published out of desperation, not because they were perfected.

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.

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

Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought. The process ... has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas.

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.

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

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

The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?'

Jews had an outsider's eye on a lot of Western tradition.

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

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