The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition

Meyer Howard (M. H.) Abrams was a foundationally important academic who helped shape critical appreciation and understanding of Romantic era poetry and literary criticism as a whole. He studied English Literature at Harvard in the 1930s and taught English Literature and Literary Theory at Cornell University.

In addition to The Mirror and the Lamp, Abrams is also well-known for Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature published in 1971, and is best known as the managing editor and creator of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. The anthology served as a primary introductory text to English literature as a collection of important texts considered in context of history and culture for decades in American academia, and is still widely in use today. He served as the managing editor of the collection for 38 years before ceding leadership to Stephen Greenblatt.

In his career teaching and writing, he taught prominent author Thomas Pynchon and renowned critic Harold Bloom. In 2014, Abrams was awarded The National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, just a year before his death. Later in his life, he continued teaching as a professor emeritus and worked on theory surrounding the effect of reading poetry out loud, which he titled The Fourth Dimension of a Poem.