Dr. James Irving Wimsatt, professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, passed away Sunday morning, He was 96.
Dr. Wimsatt was a personal friend of mine, and of many other readers of this blog. I met him through his son, Andrew.
He was a great guy. I always felt intimidated by him: I described him to someone (no disrespect intended, Andrew) as “scary smart and tough as a bus station steak”. He was walking several miles a day on a regular basis well into his 90s. And he remained in full possession of his facilities pretty much right up until his death (though he’d been in and out of hospitals and rehab).
I thought this was kind of a neat entry from encyclopedia.com:
In Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century, Wimsatt provides a wide range of information and analysis that treats comprehensively Chaucer’s reciprocal relationships with fourteenth-century French poetry and poetic theory. In addition to considering the works of Chaucer, Wimsatt addresses the efforts of such poets as Guillaume de Machaut, Jean de le Mote, Froissart, Oton de Granson, and Eustache Deschamps, writers who have previously been dismissed as mundane or not worth literary examination. However, Wimsatt considers them all viable poets and pays close attention to their lyric styles in particular. He also looks at the climate of the culture at the time and how this affected the themes of these writers’ works and any overlap in ideas. Jane H.M. Taylor, writing for the Review of English Studies, remarked that “Wimsatt’s breadth of knowledge is remarkable; his contribution to Chaucer studies is valuable, and indeed, on the rather neglected Oton de Granson and Eustache Deschamps, he offers insights which French scholars too might well find worthwhile.” Ardis Butterfield, in a review for Medium Aevum, dubbed the book “a substantial and reliable guide to Chaucer’s connections with fourteenth-century France.”
He wasn’t just a Chaucerian, though my understanding is he was a damn good one. He also wrote a lot about other poets. Dr. Wimsatt was kind enough, at one point, to give me a copy of his Hopkins’s Poetics of Speech Sound. I haven’t read it yet, being backlogged, but I wish I had before he passed.
He also served honorably in the US Navy. And he was a pretty regular member of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy.
“He that loveth God will do diligence to please God by his works, and abandon himself, with all his might, well for to do.”
–Geoffrey “Big Geoff” Chaucer
I believe that Dr. Wimsatt did indeed please God by his works, and he’s up there laughing with all those other English professors of that generation.
(Crossposed to the Logbook of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy.)
