Michael Ferber is a scholar of William Blake and the Romantic poets. His book The Social Vision of William Blake was published by Princeton University Press in 1985, and since then he has published several books on the poetry of Blake, Shelley, and the Romantics with Penguin, Blackwell, Cambridge University Press, and Oxford University Press.

He also writes more generally about literature, language, and poetry and is the author of A Dictionary of Literary Symbols, now in its third edition from Cambridge. He writes as clearly as he can about language, including an article about the use of the Oxford comma; a long essay that explains astronomy for English majors, since poetry is full of celestial objects and events; a long list of etymologies of terms about poetry; and a short, amusing list of “hapaxes,” words used only once.

His latest book, Poetry and Language: The Linguistics of Verse, also published by Cambridge University Press, is an accessible introduction to poetry's unusual uses of language. As its blurb says, “This original and unusually wide-ranging study delivers an engaging and often witty summary of how we define what poetry is.” He hopes that’s true.

Michael Ferber is also known for his involvement in the Vietnam War resistance movement and the Boston Five. In 1967 he helped organize and publicize a ceremony at the Arlington Street Church in Boston, where draft-age men turned in their draft cards and pledged to refuse induction and go to prison. He then traveled to Washington D.C. to turn the draft cards over to the U.S. Department of Justice. He was indicted, along with the other members of the Boston Five, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., Mitchell Goodman, and Marcus Raskin. He was sentenced to two years in prison for conspiring to aid and abet young men to violate the draft law, but an appeals court overturned the verdict.