- Critic | July 23, 1912 - April 21, 2015
Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.
M. H. Abrams
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We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.
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The Romantics were whipping boys of the New Criticism, but they appealed to me anyway. I was recalcitrant. It was clear to me that they had thought innovatively.
MeCriticismThoughtNewClearWere
John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.
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When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
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The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.
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We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.
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Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.
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If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
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When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect.
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If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.
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We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.
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