Among modern American critics, M. H. Abrams ranks as one of the foremost defenders of humanistic and historical literary study. His two major works, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) and Natural Supernaturalism (1971), base their historical arguments on...

When M. H. Abrams published a defense, in 1972, of "theorizing about the arts" ["What's the Use of Theorizing about the Arts?"], some of his critics accused him of falling into subjectivism. He had made his case so forcefully against "the confrontation model of aesthetic criticism" and had so effectively argued against "simplified" and "invariable" models of the art work and of "the function of criticism" that some re...

Wayne Booth is quite right [see excerpt above]: for all my interest in the methods of literary criticism, I say nothing about method in my two historical books, The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism. The reason for my silence on this issue is simple: these books were not written with any method in mind. Instead they were conceived, researched, worked out, put together, pulled apart, and put back together, not according to a theory of valid procedures in such under-takings, but by intuition. I ...

M. H. Abrams, whose Mirror and the Lamp is one of the most influential books on the early nineteenth century, is a master of the themes of Romanticism. It is doubtful if anyone has surpassed, or that many have equaled, the range and depth of his reading. His point of departure in Natural Supernaturalism is Wordsworth's scheme for the great unfinished poem called The Recluse, a poem which was to crown the poet's work and to which the rest of his verse was to stand as chapels to the main body of...