The Mirror and the Lamp

"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. What MH Abrams demonstrates in The Mirror and the Lamp is the way in which we turned from the renaissance, and classical notions of art as a reflection of nature. Hence the mirror to art as an individual daemonic form, which, like a lamp, sends out its own light, its own ideas and its own exuberance. I know. He also wrote another magnificent work of scholarly criticism which has deeply influenced me, Natural Supernaturalism , which carries on the argument of The Mirror and the Lamp . He remains a father figure to me, 18 years older than I am, a mentor and close personal friend."