Columbia professor George Stade died of peneumonia on February 26. He was eighty-five, a mainstay of the Columbia English department for nearly forty years, blessed with good looks and athletic ability in addition to brains. Here's a link to the Washington Post obit.
George was a great guy, easy to talk to, who knew an awful lot about modern literature but never put on airs. He was also exactly right about the fate of English departments in the US. “There are those people who see literature in traditional ways, which includes historical circumstances, and there is a school that wants to see literature as a symptom of all the evils of society.”
Beyond nostalgia and the memory of an excellent teacher, I have a special reason for remembering George with great fondness. It was he who suggested that I write my PhD dissertation on the prose poem in America and England. He made the suggestion in a casual conversation on the fourth floor of Hamilton Hall, and I grasped its rightness instinctively. I spent much of the next four years reading widely as the subject demanded –Baudelaire and Poe; Rimbaud, Max Jacob, Francis Ponge, and Henri Michaux; such antecedents of the prose poem as the King James Bible, Macpherson's Ossian, and Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell"; theories of prose and verse as propounded by Coleridge, Shelley, T. S. Eliot, Paul Valery, Owen Barfield, and Christopher Ricks; full-length books of prose poetry by William Carlos Williams and Geoffrey Hill. My dissertation had individual chapters on four writers — Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden ("The Orators," "Caliban to the Audience," and "Vespers"), and John Ashbery ("Three Poems"). And I began to translate Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris.
All that was your doing, George, and I wish I could turn back the clock and spend an afternoon with you talking about this project when it was new. You'd have made me improve it. I see all its defects, but in my own defense I was teaching full-time for three of the four years when I wrote "The Marriage of Poetry and Prose." I should have dedicated it to you. — David Lehman