Word: spenser
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...style from 13th century Romanesque through Gothic and Tudor to Victorian. Somehow all the styles blend in a nobly ancient mix of ornate walls, curlicued towers, spires, domes and gables, archways, turrets, gargoyles and waterspouts. The atmosphere is that of a contemplative sanctuary, the world where Wordsworth recorded "Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven." Gowned scholars still mount gloomy stair wells to their dark, dank digs...
...heart attack a few days before his 65th birthday last week, the London obituaries generously summed up the impressive achievements of an impressive scholar. He had been a witty, well-attended lecturer at Oxford, a brilliant professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge; his studies of Spenser and Milton were already critical classics. Oxbridge will remember him for that; to the rest of the Christian world, C. S. Lewis was one of the church's minor prophets, a defender of the faith who with fashionable urbanity justified an unfashionable orthodoxy against the heresies of his time...
...when it concerns Keats's personal life, it recovers at least to the level of patent silliness where literature is involved. "Though 'Calidore' (one of Keats's earliest poems) is a fantasy of rebirth, of emergence into a masculine world, not of mere retreat as was the 'Imitation of Spenser' (Keats's first poem), it shows Keats still closely tied to half remembered early experience, not yet ready for the full freedom of mature creation." Bate, on the other hand, treats it as a poem, not a sympton...
...Titanic crash brought the only other major change to Harvard that year, with the bequest of the Widener collection which included first editions of Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Johnson, Goldsmith, Gray, Keats, and Shelley. There were also volumes of the modern authors: Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Stevenson, which in many instances were personally associated with their authors. Some copies contained presentation inscriptions; others, manuscript corrections and annotations...
...English education, Americans are more aware of Oxford, perhaps because Rhodes scholars go there. Few even realize that the reputable university in Cambridge, Mass., was founded by a B.A. (Cantab.) named John Harvard; few could guess that Cambridge is the alma mater of Bacon, Byron, Darwin, Erasmus, Milton, Newton, Spenser, Tennyson, Thackeray, Walpole and Wordsworth. Strong in classics and "PPE" (philosophy, politics, economics), Oxford has dominated Whitehall and Westminster. But now England has a surfeit of politicians and debaters. It needs more scientists and engineers, and so it needs Cambridge...