Ethnicity Scottish Role Writer Name Wallace Fowlie | Subject French Literature Alma mater Harvard University | |
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Born November 8, 1908
Brookline, Massachusetts ( 1908-11-08 ) Occupation Scholar, translator, teacher, poet Nationality United States of America Notable works Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters (trans.); Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel as Poet Died August 16, 1998, Durham, North Carolina, United States Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada People also search for Georges Couton, Edward Southey Joynes, Moliere, Rikie Suzuki, Arthur Conan Doyle Books Rimbaud and Jim Morrison, Age of surrealism, A reading of Dante's Inferno, Poem & symbol, Characters from Proust | ||
Education Harvard University (1936) | ||
sensation by arthur rimbaud translated by wallace fowlie eiu napomo 2013
Wallace Fowlie (1908–1998) was an American writer and professor of literature. He was the James B. Duke Professor of French Literature at Duke University where he taught from 1964 to the end of his career. He discovered French as a high school student in Brookline, Massachusetts. One of the influential events of his adolescence was a visit to Copley Plaza to attend a virtually incomprehensible lecture by Paul Claudel. Recalling the lecture in his memoir Journal of Rehearsals, Fowlie wrote "I felt that a part of my destiny would be to study his poetry and to understand it in French as one, possessor of two languages, might do."
Contents
- sensation by arthur rimbaud translated by wallace fowlie eiu napomo 2013
- Introducing transformational French writers to America and England
- Works
- References
In 1928, while in his third year at Harvard, Fowlie traveled to France for the first time. He stayed with the family of Ernest Psichari in Paris, and later wrote his thesis on Psichari, a writer and religious thinker who had died in the first World War. By this time, he had also completed his first reading of Proust, which he described as " the most profound literary experience I have ever had." Over the course of his lifetime, Fowlie traveled to France many times and befriended writers such as Gide, Cocteau, St.John Perse (Leger), and Jean Genet. His Harvard years were 1926 through 1936. At Harvard he attended the classes and lectures of TS Eliot. One day Eliot invited a small group of students to meet a friend of his. This 'friend' turned out to be the poet W.B. Yeats. On another occasion, Fowlie saw Eliot collapse with a violent thud in the Catholic chapel. He helped him up and led him back to his seat. He immediately recognized that Eliot had had a mystical experience.
Introducing transformational French writers to America and England
From the forties onward, Fowlie filled a vacuum in academia. There was room for a great teacher and explainer of significant modern French poets and writers in America and England. For several decades, Fowlie was the pre-eminent critic of French literature in America. He published book after book on the great French writers he revered, including Mallarme and Rimbaud. He was the first translator of Rimbaud in English. Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters appeared in 1966. This work aligned him with his friend Henry Miller, whose work he championed, and brought Rimbaud to a new generation of fans— and with it the acknowledgment and gratitude of rock stars Patti Smith and Jim Morrison. Morrison wrote Fowlie a letter which he forgot about until his students played him the music of the Doors. He quickly recognized Rimbaud's influence in the lyrics. Then he remembered and retrieved the letter. As an octogenarian, he published Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel As Poet.
Perhaps his most enduring legacy, however, is the product of six decades of teaching at universities in the United States, including Yale, Bennington, Holy Cross, U. Colorado-Boulder, and Duke. Devoted to teaching, particularly undergraduate courses in French, Italian, and modernist literature, Fowlie influenced several generations of American college students. Probably his best-known student is another writer and critic of French literature, Roger Shattuck.
Fowlie received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 1947.
Fowlie corresponded with literary figures such as Henry Miller, René Char, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Alexis Léger (Saint-John Perse), Marianne Moore, and Anaïs Nin. His translations of Rimbaud were appreciated by a younger generation that included Jim Morrison and Patti Smith. In 1990, Fowlie consulted with director Oliver Stone on the film The Doors.