The Fourth Dimension of a Poem: and Other Essays

by M.H. Abrams, Harold Bloom (Foreword)

In the year of his one-hundredth birthday, preeminent literary critic, scholar, and teacher M. H. Abrams brings us a collection of nine new and recent essays that challenge the reader to think about poetry in new ways. In these essays, three of them never before published, Abrams engages afresh with pivotal figures in intellectual and literary history, among them Kant, Keats, and Hazlitt. The centerpiece of the volume is Abrams’s eloquent and incisive essay “The Fourth Dimension of a Poem” on the pleasure of reading poems aloud, accompanied by online recordings of Abrams’s revelatory readings of poems such as William Wordsworth’s “Surprised by Joy,” Alfred Tennyson’s “Here Sleeps the Crimson Petal,” and Ernest Dowson’s “Cynara.” The collection begins with a foreword by Abrams’s former student Harold Bloom.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Essays, Literature, Nonfiction

254 pages, Hardcover

First published September 3, 2012

About the author

Meyer Howard Abrams is an American literary critic, known for works on Romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp. In a powerful contrast, Abrams shows that until the Romantics, literature was usually understood as a mirror, reflecting the real world, in some kind of mimesis; but for the Romantics, writing was more like a lamp: the light of the writer's inner soul spilled out to illuminate the world. 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.

Abrams was born in a Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey. The son of a house painter and the first in his family to go to college, he entered Harvard University as an undergraduate in 1930. He went into English because, he says, "there weren't jobs in any other profession, so I thought I might as well enjoy starving, instead of starving while doing something I didn't enjoy." After earning his baccalaureate in 1934, Abrams won a Henry fellowship to the University of Cambridge, where his tutor was I.A. Richards. He returned to Harvard for graduate school in 1935 and received his Masters' degree in 1937 and his PhD in 1940. During World War II, he served at the Psycho-Acoustics Laboratory at Harvard. He describes his work as solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment by establishing military codes that are highly audible and inventing selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background. In 1945 Abrams became a professor at Cornell University. As of March 4th, 2008, he was Class of 1916 Professor of English Emeritus there.

Reviews

[Bret · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is quite simply a work of genius, of pure, unadulterated genius. Anyone that cares about poetry (and certainly anyone who writes about poetry) should incline their ear to the clear, quiet voice of Abrams, as he humanely ruminates over human creation and human interpretation in the art of human language.

In an era of posthumanism, transhumanism, metaverses, AI-run-amok, approaching singularities, and what-have-you, this is a book badly needed. I said you should read it if you care about poetry, but really it is larger than that—you should read it if you care about the humanities. No, more than that, humanity.

If you don’t care about humanity, I don’t think you’ll read this book. But even then, you should.

[Paul Varner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Abrams wrote the seminal books on English Romanticism: The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism. His work began in the era of New Criticism and ended in the heyday if theory. Read this book for a detailed takedown of each of the major figures theory: Derrida, Foucault, and all the rest. Each figure in the ring with a heavyweight champion. A beautiful last book by a great critic.