Splendor of Heart: Walter Jackson Bate and the Teaching of Literature - Hardcover

Richardson, Robert D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1567924751 ISBN 13: 9781567924756

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher, 2013

Synopsis

In The Education of Henry Adams, Adams presciently observed that "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." Walter Jackson Bate, the legendary Harvard professor, was far more than a celebrated and decorated biographer; he was an inspired teacher. And books about great teachers are rare. Here Robert Richardson, himself a distinguished teacher and biographer, takes the reader back to the Harvard of the fifties when men like Bate could hold a classroom of undergraduates enthralled by making literature seem "achingly human, and real, and important," a task that involved not only exploring the work but the authors themselves their lives, their hopes and their failures. Above all, Bate instilled in his students the heterodox notion that learning itself means nothing unless it leads to action, that simply understanding the text is a dead end unless the words affect and change behavior.

About this title

About the Author

Robert D. Richardson is a biographer and literary historian. His books include Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986), Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2006). He has been the recipient of many prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim, a Huntington Library, and a National Humanities Center Fellowship. He taught for many years at the University of Denver, and he and his wife, Annie Dillard, have called Key West home since 1994.

Reviews

This slim, small book packs a sweet wallop, both emotionally and intellectually. Nearly everyone recalls an influential teacher, but the professor Richardson recalls—in such emphatic detail and confiding prose—is Walter Jackson Bate (1918–99). Bate initially taught a sophomore-survey English class at Harvard in the 1950s, and in brief, anecdotal chapters, Richardson remembers him then and in later years, quoting from works Bate loved and rounding out his memories with interludes of walks, visits to Bate’s farm, or trips through a forest in an old jeep. The book’s first half is chapbooklike—quoting many treasured poems and ideas—and Richardson also recalls Bate’s verbal mannerisms so readers can nearly hear his enthusiasm. The book concludes with a wide-ranging interview with Bate by John Paul Russo; the discussion moves from Coleridge to Freud and further limns Bate’s ideas on education and educating. Bate won two Pulitzers (John Keats, 1963; Samuel Johnson, 1977), among other awards; this little gem shows he is still much remembered, and literary readers will find themselves also being taught by Bate. --Eloise Kinney

Edition details

• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1567924751
• ISBN 13: 9781567924756
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 127