The Mirror and the Lamp
Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
How criticism turned from seeing art as a mirror held to nature to seeing it as a lamp lit from within.
Abrams organised Romantic criticism around a change of metaphor: from the mind as a mirror held up to nature to the mind as a lamp casting its own light. Published in 1953, the book traces how that shift remade the theory of poetry in Wordsworth, Coleridge and their contemporaries, and it remains the standard account of what Romanticism did to criticism.
Recommended by 1 Person
Harold Bloom
I was a Cornell freshman of 17 when I met Meyer Howard Abrams, MH Abrams, who to this day is my dear friend Mike. I’ve just turned 81, Mike has just turned 99, but he’s alive and well in Ithaca, New York, and still reads and writes with real power. The Mirror and the Lamp, his great book, is a study of the relation between romantic critical theory and a classic of literary scholarship.
Interview · August 2011
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