Hazard Adams

Hazard Adams (February 15, 1926 - February 24, 2023) was a literary critic, educator, and Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. A leading scholar on the poetry and art of William Blake, Adams is also known for his work in literary aesthetics and literary theory, editing the college-level textbooks Critical Theory Since Plato (co-edited with Leroy Searle) and Critical Theory Since 1965 (also co-edited with Searle). During his career he contributed to the development of the fields of Critical and Literary Theory within American academic institutions.
Adams received his bachelor's degree at Princeton University, and his Master's and PhD at the University of Washington, followed by a Fulbright research and teaching fellowship at Trinity College, Dublin.Hazard Adams Adams taught at a number of universities, including Cornell University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Texas, Austin, before his arrival at the University of California, Irvine, where he stayed from 1964 to 1977.Hazard AdamsIn Memoriam: Hazard Adams, University of Washington News There he helped establish the MA and PhD programs in Comparative Literature, and was the co-founder with Murray Krieger of the School of Criticism and Theory (now housed at Cornell University).In Memoriam: Remembering Hazard Adams, University of California, Irvine News Adams joined the English and Comparative Literature faculties of the University of Washington in 1977, becoming Byron W. Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities in 1988, and Professor Emeritus in 1995.Hazard AdamsIn Memoriam: Hazard Adams, University of Washington News
A specialist in the poetry and literature of Romanticism, Adams' scholarly writings examined the philosophical, religious, and symbolic aspects of William Blake, William Butler Yeats, and other poets, first illustrated in his 1955 study Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision. As a scholar he was influenced by philosophers such as Giambattista Vico, Immanuel Kant, and Ernst Cassirer, and wrote about poets such as Blake, Yeats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, and Seamus Heaney, as well as authors such as James Joyce and Joyce Cary. 
Adams' 1983 study Philosophy and the Literary Symbolic has been described as "an admirably courageous, impressively wide-ranging, and genuinely stimulating study of thinking about the literary symbol."Shyamal Bagchee, "Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic, Hazard Adams," Modern Philology 84.2 (Nov. 1986), p. 239. Writing about The Offense of Poetry (2007), a reviewer summarizes Adams' work on poetry and poetics: "With undeniable passion and intellectual range, he [Adams] situates these works historically and imagines them surging forth—an energy field of overlapping fictions and tropological urgency—to help us tolerate a culture of bottom lines and effective communication."Benjamin Lee, "Hazard Adams, The Offense of Poetry," Modern Philology 109.1 (August 2011), p. E5 Adams has also published novels, poetry, essay collections, edited anthologies, and a memoir.
Category:1926 births
Category:Princeton University alumni
Category:University of Washington alumni
Category:Literary critics
Category:Educators
Category:Professors
Category:2023 deaths