When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.

Abrams is recalling an intellectual climate in which “the history of ideas” (the tracing of concepts across time, disciplines, and texts) was a dominant scholarly orientation at Harvard. The remark implicitly contrasts that earlier moment with later critical fashions—suggesting that what counted as “leading” work in literary studies can shift with institutional priorities and methodological trends. It also hints at Abrams’s own formation: his criticism often situates literary works within broader conceptual and philosophical lineages, so the quote reads as a brief explanation of the academic milieu that helped shape his approach to Romanticism and critical theory.