Frederic Will

Early years

The American poet/novelist/critic/translator Frederic Will was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1928. His parents, Samuel and Constance, moved the family to the Midwest in 1930; Will's father was for the next 25 years a professor of French at the University of Illinois and at Indiana University. His mother was a bilingual (English/French) housewife. The house in which he was brought up was lined with bookshelves of French literary classics--Montaigne and Rabelais featured, in leather bindings cut for them on the Left Bank. Will was raised on the campus of the University of Illinois, where—except during two years of asthma recovery in Arizona—he remained until going to Phillips Andover for his senior year of high school. His subsequent education was at Harvard (1946), Laval University in Quebec, and at Indiana University (B.A. in Classics, 1949), and Yale University (PhD Comparative Literature, 1954). Laval, with its pre-modern Thomist atmosphere, was the deepest of these forays into learning from others.

Personal life

Will is married, has six children, and lives both in Mount Vernon, Iowa and in Delta State, Nigeria. He has traveled widely, both in Asia and Africa, and has only two more locations on his must-visit list: Russia and Zaire. Writing and traveling seem to him activities that call on one another, as though the appetite of the world to be named accompanied the writing instrument of the seeing traveler.

Career

Will has taught Comparative Literature, Classics, and Translation Workshops at various Universities in the United States and abroad: Dartmouth (1951–54), Penn State (1955–60), University of Texas (1960–65), University of Iowa (1965–70, 1983–85), University of Wisconsin (1967), University of Massachusetts Amherst (1970–83), University of Colorado (1978), Deep Springs College (2004–06), Instituto de Estudios Criticos (2007). He was Co-Director of the University of Iowa International Writing Program (1983-1985). He was Overseer and President of Mellen University (1990–1999). Abroad he has taught at the Universities of Tuebingen, Tunis, Ivory Coast, Chad, Mizoram (India), Chang'sha China (Hunan Normal). He currently teaches for the Humanities University (humanitiesuniversity.org or humanitiesinstitute.org) where he is Vice President for Research.

Awards

Editorial work

Founding editor (with William Arrowsmith) of Arion, A Journal of Classical Culture (1962--) University of Texas. Founder and editor of Micromegas, A Journal of Poetry in Translation (1965–75). Arion marked a turning point in Anglo-American classical studies, replacing positivist 'contribution studies' by more imaginative and daring efforts to open the classical tradition into its blazing richness. Micromegas, like Robert Bly's The Sixties, was a single-handed effort to enrich American poetry with the bloodstreams of at first contemporary Latin-American poetry, and then, in subsequent issues, of a wide variety of national issues--French, German, Hungarian, Greek, Icelandic.

Archival material

Will's literary and editorial papers (1962–) are in the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.The collection includes hundreds of pages of manuscripts of both published and unpublished materials, in addition to an extensive correspondence dating back to the University of Texas Renaissance, under HRC Director, Harry Ransom.

Review entries on his work

Contemporary American Thought; Twentieth Century Literary Criticism; Politica Economia Cultura (Santiago de Chile); Contemporary Authors 1; Margins; International Who's Who in Poetry. Essay studies of his work in Frank Shynnagh (pseudonym), "Opus," Iowa Review (1992); Albert Cook, "On Frederic Will," Iowa Review (1992); book length study, Frank Shynnagh (pseudonym), Song Broken, Song: The Work of Frederic Will (Mellen, 2008).