Word: levins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...couple of years later, when T. S. Eliot was lecturing at Harvard, Theodore Spencer showed him a Levin essay on the metaphysical poets which Eliot liked so much that he decided to publish it in his influential literary magazine, The Criterion...
...Levin added to his own legend by several Herculean feats in other activities. During his senior year, for instance, he was managing a production of 'Sophocles' Philoctetes which the Classics Club (John Finley, President) was presenting, when their Odysseus became ill a few days before curtain time. Levin had never studied Greek in his life, but he somehow succeeded in memorizing the lengthy part, and the result, in Millman Perry's exuberant terms, was "the best performance of a Greek tragedy since the fifth century...
...Levin continued his astronomical rise after college with a Shaw Fellowship, which he used for study at the Sorbonne, and with his appointment, immediately afterwards to Harvard's newly organized Society of Fellows. Famous during this period for his fiery reviews in such liberal intellectual journals as The Nation and The New Republic, he had nevertheless restricted his scholarly endeavors, for the most part, to respectably antique subjects. When James Joyce published his last and longest book, however, Levin could not resist penning a review called "On First Looking Into Finnegans Wake." He was one of the first critics courageous...
...years later, Levin had completed James Joyce, a book which served as the inspiration for New Directions' "Makers of Modern Literature" series, and which most scholars consider the best critical survey of Joyce's work as a whole yet written. He was then an Instructor in English, aged twenty-nine...
...that time he was already noted for the unusual breadth of his scholarship, which eventually ranged from such books as Ben Jonson and The Overreacher, a study of Christopher Marlowe, to Balzac, Flaubert, and Toward Stendhal. Appointed a full professor here in 1948 at the age of 36, Levin has taught courses varying from "Modern American Poetry," which he gave as a visiting professor at Tokyo University last summer, to "Shakespeare" and "Proust, Joyce and Mann...