Students in Jonathan Culler's Major Poets class returned from spring break March 28 to a literary treat. M.H. "Mike" Abrams, the Class of 1916 Professor of English Emeritus, presented an abbreviated version of his classic lecture "The Fourth Dimension of a Poem" to a packed classroom.

Abrams, the founding editor of the highly influential Norton Anthology of Literature, has had a significant impact on the field of literary criticism. His guest lecture offered a rare insight into his critical approach to poetry and was an unusual return to the critic's role as professor.

Students listened attentively as Abrams identified three dimensions common to the criticism of poetry: visible cues, sounds imagined by the reader and the meaning implied by the words themselves. Entreating students to read aloud with him, Abrams demonstrated a fourth dimension of poetry commonly overlooked by critics: the tactile sensation of enunciation.

Reading from W.H. Auden's "On This Island," students uttered a description of waves, performing the front-to-back movements of the tongue as it shifts between consonants.

"Can you taste all those consonants?" Abrams asked, demonstrating how the aural dimension actually reproduces the motion of the surf described by the poem. By attending to this dimension, Abrams noted, the reader may be awakened to "lost pleasure."

Abrams began teaching at Cornell in 1945, moving up the ranks to Fredrick J. Whiton Professor of English in 1960, and Class of 1916 Professor of English in 1963. Since his retirement in 1983, Abrams has remained an esteemed presence at Goldwin Smith Hall, most recently presenting an English department lecture in November 2010.

Nearing his 99th birthday in July, Abrams continues to be an indefatigable scholar, as co-author of "A Glossary of Literary Terms," published 54 years ago and now in its 10th edition. He was general editor of the Norton Anthology through its first seven editions and is a co-editor of the eighth edition, published in 2005.

Molly Kerker is a staff member in the Department of English.