William Ellery Leonard

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

life and work

Leonard, son of a Unitarian clergyman, initially studied at Boston University ( BA 1898), where he specialized primarily in 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 from Columbia University in New York with a thesis on Byron's influence on American literature. In 1906 he received an apprenticeship at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he stayed until the end of his life and taught literature. Leonard suffered from agoraphobia since childhood . This disturbance worsened with increasing age, so that Leonard only moved in the immediate vicinity of his house and the university campus; in the last years of his life he only gave lectures in his apartment. An eccentric but kind-hearted man, he enjoyed enormous popularity among students. These included Leslie Fiedler , whom he supervised as a doctoral supervisor from 1939–1941.

In 1909 he married Charlotte Freeman, the daughter of his landlord and superior Professor CF Freeman; but shortly after the death of her father, Leonard's bride committed suicide on May 4, 1910. This tragic experience shook Leonard deeply, and he began to process in poetry the events that led to her suicide, in 1922 they appeared under the title Two Lives . This cycle of 250 sonnets received the highest praise from leading contemporary critics such as Henry L. Mencken ; the poet Stephen Vincent Benét even declared it the best American poem of the 20th century.

Even before Two Lives was printed , Leonard had made a name for himself as a poet and philologist. In addition to several volumes of his own poems, he published translations by ancient and medieval authors, including Aesop , Empedocles and Lucretius . In particular, his adaptation of the Old English Beowulf epic was a standard text in American schools and universities for decades. To the Cambridge History of English and American Literature , the most comprehensive English-American literary history at the time , Leonard contributed the chapter on William Cullen Bryant and "minor poets" of his time.

In 1927 Leonard published the autobiography The Locomotive God , an attempt at auto-psychoanalysis. In it, he explains how a traumatic childhood experience triggered his phobia : at the age of two, he was scalded by the steam jet from a passing locomotive. His second marriage (1914–1934) to Charlotte Charlton finally broke up because of Leonard's phobia. In 1935 he married Grace Golden, who was about thirty years his junior, and one of his students, causing a scandal in the press and public. This marriage also ended in divorce in 1937, but the couple remarried in 1940. Leonard died in his Madison apartment in 1944. His once praised works have now all been forgotten.

Since 1926 he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Works

Poems and prose

Dramas

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

Translations, revisions, philological works

literature

  • Chester E. Jorgenson: William Ellery Leonard: An Appraisal . In: A. Dale Wallace, Woodbrun O. Ross (Ed.): Studies in Honor of John Wilcox. Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1958.
  • Chauncey D. Leake: 1876-1944 William Ellery Leonard: Tormented Genius of the Midlands . In: Wisconsin Alumnus 77: 4, 1976. ( digitized version )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members: William Ellery Leonard. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 9, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Leonard, William Ellery
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet
DATE OF BIRTH January 25, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Plainfield , New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH May 22, 1944
Place of death Madison , Wisconsin