When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
More Quotes by M. H. Abrams
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.
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.
If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.
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.
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.