I. Getting to Know Dick

When I signed up for Richard Poirier’s seminar at Rutgers in 1996, it was out of obligation. As an American-literature grad student (“Americanist,” in grad-school lingua franca), I was expected to take Poetry and Pragmatism—a course decisively bound to the modernist project, with a syllabus that included William James, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, and Ralph Waldo Emerson—even though I had come to graduate school to study the works of the early settlers, fiery jeremiads and captivity narratives, sentimental novels and transcripts of witch trials. But the ethos of the Rutgers Americanist demanded I expand beyond my specific interest zone; since there was so little American literature, we were expected to be fluent in all of it, from Winthrop to Updike.

I do not think Dick—everyone referred to him as Dick—particularly enjoyed teaching our class (named after his 1992 book, Poetry and Pragmatism, also on our syllabus), though he was a bit of a ham. He had the weary, bemused quality of an old vaudevillian during his final run. I was also not any kind of teacher’s pet. That role was assigned to a vapid yet good-looking boy who left the program to go to law school after completing his MA. While his student, I didn’t really appreciate Dick’s genius. I grew frustrated when he went on tangents, and kept a tally sheet of his favorite detours: King Lear, Balanchine, The Equalizer, speculation or specious facts about the sex lives of writers, some of which turned out to be true (“T. S. Eliot couldn’t give it away!”). There were flashes of brilliance, to be sure: a charged passage of Stein’s “Melanctha,” Wallace Stevens’s poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” incredible readings of Emerson. Once we talked for an hour about the word impudent in Emerson’s essay “Experience”: its punishing, punning, sexual overtones (the root is pudendum, Latin for “that of which one ought to be ashamed,” commonly used to refer to the vulva). The sentence in which it appeared—“The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent knowingness”—might as well have been a motto for the class.

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As it turned out, mine was the last graduate seminar Dick ever taught; he semiretired soon after to concentrate on his other activities, mainly the journal Raritan (now edited by Rutgers historian Jackson Lears). When Dick died, in 2009, I found myself recalling him fondly, and I started reading more of his work. By then I had left academia, but the lessons I found in Dick’s work apply more to me now, as an independent scholar, than they might have if I had stayed....