Synopses & Reviews
The real test of Abram's historical explanations is of course whether or not they "work" --whether, when we apply the criteria of correspondence and coherence (Just as in interpreting a poem), they "make sense" out of the particulars at hand and produce useful generalizations even in the face of competing historical interpretations. Abrams' work continues to hold up. --Jack Stillinger
Synopsis
In method the essays represent a combination of historical and biographical interpretation, explication of specific texts, and the study of sources, genre, and style; less formally, they represent the application of knowledge and intuition based on several decades of reading, thinking, and life experience.
About the Author
M. H. Abrams (1912--2015) was Class of 1916 Professor of English, Emeritus at Cornell University. He received the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Prize for The Mirror and the Lamp and the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize for Natural Supernaturalism. He is also the author of The Milk of Paradise, A Glossary of Literary Terms, The Correspondent Breeze, and Doing Things with Texts. He is the recipient of Guggenheim, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller Postwar fellowships, the Award in Humanistic Studies from the Academy of Arts and Sciences (1984), the Distinguished Scholar Award by the Keats-Shelley Society (1987), and the Award for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1990). In 1999 The Mirror and the Lamp was ranked twenty-fifth among the Modern Library's "100 best nonfiction books written in English during the twentieth century."Jack Stillinger (Ph.D. Harvard) is Center for Advanced Study Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Illinois. He is the author of The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats's Poems, The Texts of Keats's Poems, the standard edition of The Poems of John Keats; Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius; Coleridge and Textual Instability; and Reading "The Eve of St. Agnes." He is the recipient of Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson fellowships and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Table of Contents
Wordsworth and Coleridge on diction and figures -- The correspondent breeze -- English romanticism -- Structure and style in the greater romantic lyric -- Coleridge, Baudelaire, and modernist poetics -- Two roads to Wordsworth -- Coleridge's "A light in sound" -- Coleridge and the romantic vision of the world -- Apocalypse.