Word: browere
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Besides Amherst, Brower has two distinct models for a Harvard house. One, Kenneth Murdock's Leverett House in the thirties, was "a marvelous experience" for him, then a young member of its tutorial staff. The other is the English college and specifically Christ's College, Cambridge, which he vividly recalls from his two years there after graduating from Amherst. "It was a revelation. The college is a wonderful institution, really the center of the student's intellectual life...
...Brower seeks a shift of some of the emphasis from the classroom to the house, he still regards himself primarily as a teacher. Though a recognized scholar in both English and Classics and the author of one book and numerous articles, he insists "everything I've done academically stems from my teaching...
...When Brower says teaching, he means "preparing the student for a job of his own, in imitation of the job which I am doing. I want a minimum emphasis on rehearsing what I said and a maximum stress on preparation for doing what I did." He is not against the lecture system. "There is definitely a place for the presentation of the best sort of professional job of which a teacher is capable. The lecturer goes wrong as a teacher only when he is not most concerned with the student's imitation of that...
...considers the chief influence on his thinking about literature, and especially poetry, to be his contact with Robert Frost. The two became close friends as teacher and student at Amherst and the friendship persisted when Brower became a graduate student here. Frost was among the contributers to a magazine which Brower started in 1932, called The New Frontier, "a little magazine with a social conscience whose only distinction was that instead of dying it just stopped...
Like Frost, Brower loves New England, loves particularly to take long walks along its country roads. He is an inveterate walker and at Amherst he often led a hiking group through the surrounding woods, spicing the ramblings with peripatetic philosophy. Early this summer he did some concentrated meandering on Cape Cod, "way down, you know, where Thoreau walked...