James longenbach biography

The University of Rochester English professor and acclaimed poet devoted his life's work to studying, teaching, and writing poetry.

While walking toward the library, I wondered if there had been a mistake. I had been given a list of poems, essays and reviews published in several little magazines during and after the Great War and asked to print copies of them. I had read many of those works in a course on literary modernism during my first year as a graduate student in literature.

Yet there I was two years later, a student in a seminar on Anglo-American literary modernism, thinking myself wiser yet stranded in the stacks in a fog of doubt. Was the list in my hand suggesting that I had not even passed Go? As I cranked through the first few reels of microfilm searching for the texts it was the late Eighties , my worries evaporated.

James Longenbach (Sept.

I kept stumbling on surprises and stopping to read them. There were two scrappy letters from William Carlos Williams about sexual psychology and Otto Weininger, the Viennese sexologist whose writings had convinced the poet that his philandering was preventing him from becoming a literary genius. The list is lost, but I remember finishing all the copying that day and returning often to the microfilm archive to continue the treasure hunt.

I owe that serendipitous library errand to James Longenbach, a poet and literary critic who spent his entire career at the University of Rochester, from until his death last year. I never got around to asking Jim if his list was a nudge to dig deeper in the archives or something like the shield of a greeting, a gesture of fellowship and collaboration.

Even if I had asked, Jim probably would have rolled his eyes and changed the subject with the wave of a hand. What Jim enjoyed most and did best was to draw on his own archival discoveries and vast reading to tell elegant stories about the deliberate and haphazard work of discovery, experimentation and transformation lived by twentieth-century poets.

He had zero patience for polemics and was allergic to false oppositions. His standards were exacting and his achievements at once inspiring and impossible to match.