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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Abrams, M. H. (Meyer Howard), 1912–

The fourth dimension of a poem : and other essays / M.H. Abrams ; foreword by Harold Bloom. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-393-05830-7 (hardcover)

1. Poetry—History and criticism. 2. Poetics. I. Title.

PN1031.A27 2012

808.1—dc23

2012020169

eISBN: 978-0-393-08923-3

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*This was a lecture delivered at several universities in 2010–11. The text is that of the version delivered at Cornell in November 2010. The lecture relies on oral demonstrations of the diverse effects of the enunciated speech-sounds that constitute the words of a poetic passage. A video of the lecture at Cornell is available online at fourthdimensionofapoem.com.

*From The Persistence of Poetry, edited by Ronald M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst, Mass., 1998). This was a collection of papers delivered at the John Keats Bicentennial Conference held at Harvard University in September 1995. For additional analyses of the effects of the material dimension of poems (the physical articulation of their speech-sounds), see “The Fourth Dimension of a Poem,” in this volume.

*From The Emperor Redressed: Critiquing Critical Theory, edited by Dwight Eddins (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1995). This was a paper presented at a symposium, “Critiquing Critical Theory,” held at the University of Alabama in 1992.

*From The Philosophy of the Curriculum: The Need for General Education, edited by Sidney Hook, Paul Kurtz, and Miro Todorovich (Buffalo, N.Y., 1975). This was a paper delivered at a conference on “The Philosophy of the Curriculum” held at Rockefeller University in 1973. References are to two papers published in the same volume: Frederick A. Olafson, “Humanism and the Humanities,” and Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Observations on Humanism and History.”

*This was a lecture delivered at several universities, at various stages of its evolution, between 1976 and 1981. For related considerations of the nature of certainty and of the openness to disagreement in literary criticism and other humanistic enterprises, see the essays “What’s the Use of Theorizing about the Arts?” (especially pp. 67–72), and “A Note on Wittgenstein and Literary Criticism” (especially pp. 84–87), in M. H. Abrams, Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory (New York, 1989).

*From Notre Dame English Journal 13 (1981). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

*This was the introductory essay to the collection The Motif of the Journey in Nineteenth-Century Italian Literature, edited by Bruno Magliocchetti and Anthony Verna (Gainesville, Fla., 1994).

*Originally published in The New York Review of Books, May 10, 1984, under the title “The Keenest Critic.” This was an essay-review of David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (Oxford, 1983).