Written by Prof. Gordon Teskey:
This past Friday, March 2nd, 2018, we lost our beloved and awesome colleague Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, one of the greatest Miltonists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A titanic figure in modern seventeenth century studies generally, a pioneer of the scholarly study of women’s writings in the period, an exceptional mentor to generations of students—including important women scholars—Barbara was William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English Literature and of History of Literature at Harvard until her retirement in 2011, after which she was appointed William R. Kenan, Jr. Research Professor.
Barbara’s first academic appointment was at Wellesley College, 1954-56. She then taught at Brown University until coming to Harvard in 1982. She took her Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Emporia State University in 1951 and in 1956 her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago under the supervision of Ernest Sirluck, a decisive figure in the modern editing of and commentary on Milton’s prose. Sirluck’s legendary rigor and thoroughness was the model for Barbara’s “book camp” training of her own graduate students, many of whom now serve at the top of the profession.
Her books were instructive to us all, beginning with Milton’s Brief Epic (1966), on Paradise Regained, the same year she became a Guggenheim Fellow. Many who did not have the privilege to be her students can well remember reading this field-changing book in the decades after its appearance. She published Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise in 1973 and in 1979 a decisive work on seventeenth century poetry generally, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century English Lyric, a book that influenced scholarship beyond its field, including early American literature, and that has set the terms for discussion ever since. In 1985 she published ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, also a book of great influence, and a superb appreciation of the layered complexity of Milton’s art.
In 1993, at a time when enthusiasm over women writers in the seventeenth century was rising, she published a book that transformed this enthusiasm into a research field, Writing Women in Jacobean England. This was followed by an edition, The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght (1996). Amidst the gallons of ink spilled over Aemilia Lanyer’s possibly being Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, or Shakespeare himself, Barbara wisely observed that controversy over the possibility of a connection to Shakespeare drew attention away from Lanyer’s considerable poetic achievement. She did an excellent edition of Paradise Lost for Blackwell (2007) and in 2012 a still more difficult and complex edition of Milton’s Shorter Poems for the new Oxford edition of Milton’s Complete Works.
The capstone of her career was her magisterial study, John Milton: A Critical Biography, published in 2000, superseding the first great modern biography of Milton by William Riley Parker, published in 1968. The subtitle indicates something many readers have commented on: the elegance with which Barbara pauses continually in the exciting and complicated narrative of Milton’s life to give balanced, discerning, and beautifully sympathetic appreciations of the poems. These appreciations include some of the wisest things said about the art and argument of Paradise Lost. The readership for this book has extended far beyond professional Miltonists and students of English.
Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, edited by Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane, was published in 2000, a collection of high quality by distinguished scholars, almost all of whom were students of Barbara’s. John Leonard, a great Miltonist himself, made the following true observation: “Barbara excelled in four distinct areas of Milton studies: as teacher, critic, biographer, and editor. Other great Miltonists have achieved eminence in two or even three of these, but Barbara was very special indeed in achieving all four.” I would add that she stood out for a fifth and still rarer achievement, which she shared with one of the very greatest literary critics, Samuel Johnson: good sense exercised at the level of genius.
I have described only Barbara’s major publications. There are of course many more, some of them surprising. I imagine many of us feel a secret fondness and regret for work we have done that disappeared long ago, a road not taken. An example from Barbara’s reserve is an article I happened to mention to her some years ago, catching a brief smile before the modestly dismissive wave of the hand. “Federico Fellini’s Purgatorio” by Barbara K. Lewalski was published in the Massachusetts review in 1964. It is on the pattern of allusions to Dante’s Purgatorio in Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), which follow upon the clearly discernable allusions to the Inferno in La Dolce Vita (1960). At the end of her beautifully written essay Barbara describes Guido, the hapless director, leading all his characters down from the launch-tower that was built for the climactic scene of his disastrous film: the critics, the producers, the mistresses, the actors and especially the actresses (as they must be called in this film), the estranged wife and her sister, the colleagues, workers, and dubious friends, all formerly howling in rage at him. They are now transfigured in white, and Guido now leads them in a circular dance. Barbara describes the scene and observes of these characters that “Guido explicitly refuses to define priorities among them or to impose a final ordering upon them, but says all that a modern man is capable of saying about ordering his loves and the aspects of himself: he will live with them, and attempt to learn more. In some sense the dance is Dante’s great symbol of the Church as Communio Sanctorum transposed to a Communio Humanorum, and is thus an appropriate close for the modern Purgatorio. What, one may well wonder, will Fellini’s Paradiso be?”
I shall take the liberty of viewing this scene as a premonition of Barbara’s future role, which was soon to begin, as captain and chief ringleader of seventeenth century studies for the next five decades, refusing to impose a final ordering upon them. A great scholar and generous spirit has passed from among us.