William Ellery Leonard

William Ellery Leonard ( born January 25, 1876 in Plainfield, New Jersey, † May 22 1944 in Madison, Wisconsin ) was an American literary critic, writer and poet.

Life and work

Leonard, son of a Unitarian clergyman, first studied at Boston University (BA 1898), where he specialized primarily on ancient literature, and later at Harvard University (MA 1899). After graduate studies at the Universities of Bonn and Göttingen, he received his doctorate in 1904 at New York's Columbia University with a thesis on the influence of Byron on American literature. In 1906 he received a teaching position at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he remained until his death and literature taught. Leonard suffered since childhood from agoraphobia. With increasing age increased as disturbance yet, so Leonard, only still moving in the immediate vicinity of his house and the university campus; in the last years of his life he lectured from only in his apartment. As eccentric but good-hearted man he enjoyed enormous popularity among students. These proposals included Leslie Fiedler, whom he assisted in 1939-41 as a doctor father.

In 1909 he married Charlotte Freeman, the daughter of his landlord and superior Professor CF Freeman; but shortly after the death of her dad Leonards bride took on 4 May 1910, the life. This tragic experience shook Leonard deeply, and he began to process the events that led to her suicide in poems, 1922, she appeared under the title Two Lives. This cycle of 250 sonnets was praised by leading contemporary critics such as HL Mencken to the skies; the poet Stephen Vincent Benét explained it even to the best American poetry of the 20th century.

Even before the pressure of Two Lives Leonard had been able to distinguish as a poet and philologist. In addition to several volumes of her own poems, he published translations of ancient and medieval authors, including Aesop, Empedocles and Lucretius. In particular, his paraphrase of the Beowulf epic was for decades a standard text in American schools and universities. At the Cambridge History of English and American Literature, the most comprehensive at this time Anglo-American literary history, Leonard contributed the chapter on William Cullen Bryant and " lesser poets " of his time.

1927 Leonard then published the autobiography of The Locomotive God, the attempt of a car psychoanalysis. In it, he explains how a traumatic childhood experience had triggered his phobia: At the age of two years he had been scalded by the steam jet of a passing locomotive. At Leonards phobia finally broke his second marriage (1914-1934) with Charlotte Charlton. In 1935, he married the thirty years younger Grace Golden, one of his students, and thus caused a scandal in the press and public. This marriage was divorced in 1937, but in 1940 the couple married again. Leonard died in 1944 at his home in Madison. His once vaunted works are forgotten today, one and all.

Works

Poems and Prose

  • Sonnets and Poems (1906 )
  • The Poet of Galilee (1909 )
  • The vaunt of Man and Other Poems (1912 )
  • Poems 1914-1916 (1917 )
  • The Lynching Bee, and Other Poems (1920 )
  • Two Lives (1922 )
  • Tutankhamen and After: New Poems (1924 )
  • The Locomotive God ( 1927)
  • This Midland City ( 1930)
  • A Son of Earth. A Man against Time: An Heroic Dream ( 1945)

Dramas

  • Glory of the Morning (1912 )
  • Red Bird, A Drama of Wisconsin History ( 1923)

Translations, adaptations, philological works

  • Byron and Byronism in America ( 1905)
  • Fragments of Empedocles (1908 )
  • Aesop and Hyssop (1912 )
  • Titus Lucretius Carus: Of the Nature of Things (1916 )
  • Beowulf: A New Verse Translation for Fireside and Classroom (1923 )
  • Gilgamesh: Epic of Old Babylonia (1934 )
  • Bryant and the Minor Poets. In: The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol XV. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1907-21.
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