FEBRUARY 12, 2017 Los Angeles Review of Books

Kenneth Gross, Lindsay Waters, V. N. Alexander, Paul Auster, Harold Bloom,

Stanley Fish, K. J. Knoespel, Mitchell Meltzer, Victoria Nelson, Joan
Richardson, Dorion Sagan, Susan Stewart, Eric Wilson, Michael Wood

A Florilegium for Angus Fletcher

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THE CRITIC and scholar Angus Fletcher died in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on November 28, 2016. He was, at
the time of his death, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Lehman College and The Graduate Center of the
City University of New York. Fletcher was the author of the groundbreaking Allegory: The Theory of a
Symbolic Mode (1964), and followed this with a series increasingly brave and speculative volumes of literary
and philosophical thinking, including The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (1971), The Transcendental
Masque: An Essay on Milton’s “Comus” (1972), Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature
(1999), A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination
(2004), and finally The Topological Imagination: Spheres, Edges, and Islands (2016). What follows is a series
of memories and appreciations of Angus Fletcher as writer, friend, and teacher.

            — Kenneth Gross and Lindsay Waters, editors

Photograph 1 and 2: Mark Forte

V. N. ALEXANDER

As a graduate student, I was sometimes overwhelmed by the complexity of Angus Fletcher’s thinking. In class,
I was not always able to ride Angus’s train of thought, instead I had to chase it down like a clown at the pump
cart, sometimes lucky enough to catch up at the next station where I threw myself on just as it was pulling out
again. However, confusion, I now realize, may be a greatly underrated tool of learning. When you don’t know
something, you enrich the mental space it should occupy with all the possibilities supplied by the context.

Angus taught us how to acquire an aesthetic knowledge of the world, an ability most Americans are in great
danger of losing. This will be disastrous, not because without knowledge of poetry we make less impressive
dinner guests, or because poetry is necessarily uplifting to the human spirit or because poetry provides good
mental hygiene through safe play and harmless transgressions. These hopelessly vague and ultimately
meaningless ideas are trotted out and paraded around as the “reasons” why we need literature, but they just
’ i i N d b d f h N d li l d N d
Angus understood why we need literature. If the world is as complex as a poem is, and we don’t have a sense
of complexity, then we will not make sound decisions in politics, business, or science. If we regularly exercise
the mind with poetry, we are less likely to try to paraphrase the world and call it knowledge of the world.

V. N. Alexander, novelist and philosopher of science, is the author, most recently, of Locus Amoenus and
Trixie. She is a Public Scholar at the New York Council for the Humanities and a director of the Dactyl
Foundation.

PAUL AUSTER

When I began my undergraduate education at Columbia in September 1965, I knew next to nothing. I was 18,
and I had spent my years in high school cranking out dozens of short stories and poems, already convinced
that it was my destiny to become a literary man (poet, playwright, or novelist — to be determined later). But
even though I had read a fair amount for someone my age, I had read nothing written before the 19th century.
Yes, I had plowed my way through Ulysses over the summer and had anointed Joyce as my number one
novelist-hero, but I had yet to read a single line of Homer’s Odyssey. Which is to say: I still knew next to
nothing.

One of the best things about the Columbia program was the Great Books course all freshmen were required to
take, Humanities I. Not only was Homer on the syllabus, but the first semester also included works by
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Virgil, and others. As luck would have
it, my professor for that course was Angus Fletcher. As luck would also have it, the required freshman
composition course could be waived for students who had scored above a certain number on the Advanced
Placement exam. For those of us who had achieved the magic number, there was a substitute literature class
that we were supposed to take: one semester examining a single work in exhaustive detail. In my case, that
work was Tristram Shandy. And, as luck would have it, my professor for that course was also Angus Fletcher.

Imagine an 18-year-old know-nothing boy plunging into the alien waters of Homer and Sterne with Angus
Fletcher as his swimming instructor. Imagine sitting in two di erent classes seven hours every week for an
entire semester and listening to that man talk. If you listened carefully (which I did), it was bound to
reconfigure the molecules in your brain.

He had just turned 35 — an extremely youthful 35 — and he resembled no other teacher I had ever had. Not
because of his erudition, which was vast, and not because he looked upon his students as fellow seekers on a
life-long quest for understanding, but because of the quality of his mind. Unlike most professors of literature,
his aim wasn’t to master texts or crack codes or come up with definitive answers but to ask good questions —
and sometimes even the right questions.

It was never clear to me whether he prepared for the classes or not. Certainly he knew the material inside out,
certainly he had given some thought to the book or passage we would be discussing that day, but there was an
improvisatory quality to his teaching that kept us all on our toes, as if his sole purpose was to think out loud
in front of his charges and lure us into a conversation about things none of us had previously thought about. A
lanky blond with a shock of hair hanging over his forehead, there was something rumpled and bumbling about
him as he mused and pondered and muttered his witty asides to the dozen of us sitting in the room, a certain
Jimmy Stewart aura emanating from his person, an undogmatic American charm that seemed to amplify the
brilliance of his intellect. He could range far and wide, and he could dig deep, and whenever he zeroed in on a
particular detail of a particular text, what a pleasure it was to watch him pull out a slender thread and expose
it to the light, patiently pulling and pulling until the whole work began to unravel and then gradually reknit
itself into a di erent form. He made thinking an adventure. He made books the very bedrock of what it means
to be human.

Columbia was all boys back then, and nearly all of us smoked non-stop through the classes. The Humanities
course met at 9:00 a.m. for two two-hour sessions a week at the Casa Italiana on Amsterdam Avenue. One cold
December morning, as we sat there huddled in our overcoats pu ng away on our Luckys and Camels, the
room became so dense with smoke that Angus paused, looked out at us with an amused expression on his
face, and said, “I sometimes wonder if this is a classroom or a tavern.”

D A h k ll Id h i b h Fl h ’ T f h
Paul Auster is the author, most recently, of the novels 4321 and Sunset Park.

Photograph: Elsa Ruiz

HAROLD BLOOM

Angus Fletcher was my close friend from September 1951 until his recent death. When I consider my own work
as a critic, I realize again how much he goes on teaching me. His major books include Allegory: The Theory of
a Symbolic Mode; The Prophetic Moment, a study of Edmund Spenser; and The Transcendental Masque, on
Milton’s Comus. Fletcher went beyond these extraordinary achievements in Colors of the Mind, essentially an
analysis of poetic thinking. Greater work followed in A New Theory for American Poetry, centering upon Walt
Whitman and John Ashbery. In his final phase, Fletcher turned to Shakespeare, in two books exploring the
a nities between the greatest of poets and the scientific imagination.

Angus Fletcher was an authentic Renaissance magus, akin to Bruno, and to Vico in a later age. Like them, he
was a curious universal scholar, endlessly breaking the new road for literary criticism. I learned from Fletcher
how to apprehend the daemonic element in poetic imagination. For a lifetime, I have been a student of the
Western Sublime, consciously in Fletcher’s wake. When I read and teach Milton, Angus is always by my side.

I think of Fletcher as the true theorist of all Western poetry. He is a burning fountain and will not go out. His
pure spirit like Shelley’s scatters sparks from the unextinguished hearth of his thinking
Ultimately what Angus taught me was that the poetic imagination is a holy fire. When I read, in Fletcher’s
ongoing spirit, I channel him, and gather again the vision of transcendence.

Harold Bloom’s most recent books include The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King
James Bible and The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. He is Sterling Professor of
Humanities at Yale University.

STANLEY FISH

Back in 1973, I was a visiting professor at USC with a long commute, and one day I got home late to find my
wife and daughter not missing me at all because they were being entertained by Angus Fletcher who (he told
us) had driven across the country and was just stopping by to say hello. Another time Angus came to give a
talk at Johns Hopkins and told that same daughter, and only her, that he had left his prepared lecture in the
bathroom of the Washington train station. (He gave it anyway.) That was Angus, fey and magical and utterly
irresistible; he seemed to float through life on gossamer wings, never quite touching down on the mundane
ground on which the rest of us walked. But he did touch down in his scholarship, which was (and is) rock solid
and a great deal more: it is wise, far ranging, deeply incisive. The link between it and Angus’s personality is
the light grace with which he o ers his massively documented analysis of more texts than most of us have
ever heard of, never mind read. This is particularly true of his masterpiece Allegory, which, many years after
its publication, remains the indispensable account of its subject. Rarely does anyone get to say the last word
on a major genre, but he did. No one can take his place.

Stanley Fish is Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N.
Cardozo School of Law. His most recent book is Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to
Revolution.
 Photograph: James Peters

KENNETH GROSS

Angus Fletcher wanted people to feel what is most blunt and strange in the life of literature, in how literature
gives form to life. He wrote about the abstractions of allegorical fiction as visceral things, shapes of human
compulsion, or as “daemons,” wild but embodied spirits — talking as if he knew such creatures well, knew
how they lived and how they lost their lives. He described how literature shows us the world as both ordered
temple and chaotic labyrinth, and made you feel how each could be both a home and a place of exile, and then
the power of living just at the threshold between temple and maze.

I remember talking with him once about the ghost in Hamlet, that creature who describes a listener’s hair
standing up fearfully, “like quills upon the fretful porpentine.” Only a ghost would talk that way, Angus
insisted, with a curious smile. Such uncanny words were the “natural language of ghosts.” He spoke as if he
himself had talked with such creatures in the natural course of his life, and knew well the sound of them. He
wrote once about “the ghostly operations of thought whose source as thought appears to be lodged in the
I remember a late-night phone call in which he talked about laying down the coiled lines of a drip system
under the earth of his garden in the high desert of New Mexico, a work he did with his own hands. That
system became, as he described it, its own kind of wonder, also an image of thought. I pictured the buried
water-lines as a nourishing, labyrinthine script, like that page of twisted plot lines o ered up in Tristram
Shandy (a book he loved). Angus fed the minds of friends and students in unpredictable ways, often by
pointing out unpredictable words and objects around us, wonders hidden in plain sight.

I remember his talking with fascination about the Highland Scots from whom he was descended, women and
men who made their home in that stark, always changing landscape. He liked pointing out that Robert Louis
Stevenson, great romancer and traveler, came from a family of Scottish engineers who specialized in building
lighthouses on the most dangerous, storm-ridden coastlines.

In later work, thinking about how we imagine earth, and our earthly fate, he grew fascinated with another
edge or threshold: the horizon. It is a line that we both find and make, a living thing. It helped him describe
how, in poets like Clare and Whitman, the mind tries to compass its own limits, to compass both its own
world and a world outside of which it is yet a part, the world of other creatures, voices, landscapes, and
weathers. He saw these poets — indeed, all of us — always making, bending, and breaking circles, drawing
and redrawing the horizons our minds pursue, the circumference of our fears and dreams.

Marking horizons, he wrote, “is sometimes a hard business, calling the ship to reach the impossible edge of a
dull, leaden shadow line.” But the horizon is also “always only a phenomenon of beckoning promise,
reminding us that we are encircled by our own ignorance, even as we are protected by the circle of our
tentative knowing. Finally, horizon carries us outside of ourselves, yet keeps our feet on the ground.”

Angus was himself a horizon, always in motion, yet stopped somewhere waiting for you.

Kenneth Gross is the author, most recently, of Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life and Shylock is Shakespeare.
He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

K. J. KNOESPEL

The following quote from I. A. Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism represents Angus Fletcher’s impulse
to scholarship and world citizenship:

The mind does not shy away from anything, it does not protect itself with any illusion, it stands uncomforted,
unintimidated, alone and self-reliant.

The urgency Angus Fletcher brought to his book on Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare led to
our detailed phone conversations on early modern science. These conversations continued when we met in
Albuquerque, where the Flying Star Diner became a setting for discussion about Newton and allegory. Our
wonderful conversations showed how he refused to be confined or hemmed in by any prevailing mode of
theory or notion of historical epochs.

His daring to cross boundaries was encouraged by his Harvard professor, I. A. Richards, too often fixed in a
role as “New Critic.” From Richards, Fletcher learned to think synesthetically. Fletcher’s many books
concentrated the impulse for border-crossing into mapping of new territory or rendering visible something
present all the time. For Fletcher, it was essential that science be part of our discourse about language. His
work warns that a feeble knowledge of science on the part of humanists contributed to weakness in the study
of language and literature.

While he valued historical research on allegory, his own work articulated an impulse to allegoresis that
extended beyond its classical, medieval, or early modern practice. Historical scholarship was an invitation to
expand the dimensions of received understanding. Invitations came from multiple sources, i.e., Sidney’s In
Defence of Poetry (cited in both Allegory and Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism): “But poetry acts in a
diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand
unapprehended combinations of thought.” Fletcher’s scholarship still carries a forceful admonishment to
cross borders, and to ask with urgency about such unapprehended combinations of thought.

K J Knoespel is McEver Professor of Engineering and the Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech where he is building
¤

MITCHELL MELTZER

Angus spent most of his childhood sailing the coast and walking along the shores of Long Island’s east end
when the Hamptons were still inhabited by small, local populations, the houses not second homes for the rich.
It was the edge of the sea, the richness of its life amid the ceaseless metamorphosis and intermingling of
water and land that formed his imagination. In his teaching as in his public lectures, Angus was dazzling,
articulating insights as they came to him in a style so fluid, so possessed by motion and change, that you
could feel his obvious mastery happily yield to the pulse of mutability.

In his last published work, the speculatively daring The Topological Imagination, Angus persisted in
pondering the realm of edges and boundaries, the shifting perceptions of shape and scale that these
necessary, fictional demarcations created. He considered that topology, through its procedures of deformation
— the twisting, bending, and stretching of its tropes and transformations — was in essence a mathematics of
quality not quantity: a kind of poetic intrusion into the world of numbers that o ered a way of thinking
through our new global consciousness, the result of technology that has forced us for the first time to fully
inhabit the roughly spherical surface of our planet, itself a shape without edges.

It was poetry — the mind of the poet, poetry as a way of thinking — that to Angus was at the heart of
literature, and of central importance to a world of permanence in change. Indeed, much of his unique work
can be read as a wonderfully varied, learned, and profoundly idiosyncratic defense of poetry in the interests of
life.

For all the abstract play of his thought, the wide, sometimes esoteric range of his learning, Angus loved
nothing more than Whitmanian leaning, loafing, and observing. He never lost touch with the physical world of
nature, or with what he called the tra-la-la of poetry. Nor did he ever doubt the elemental power of the
delight it o ered. He told me once of a public speaking competition in which he defeated William F. Buckley
when they were undergraduates at Yale by cheating.

“Cheating?” I asked.

“I read Yeats,” he told me. “I wrote the speech so I could quote from the poems, and what could he do after
that?”

Mitchell Meltzer is the author of Secular Revelations: The Constitution of the United States and Classic
American Literature. He teaches at NYU.
 Photograph: Mark Forte

VICTORIA NELSON

I first encountered Angus Fletcher as a person rather than an author when Lindsay Waters, our mutual editor
at Harvard, pressed him into service as a reader for my book The Secret Life of Puppets. Unfortunately a
computer glitch — I suspect Angus su ered a lot of them — had erased large portions of his report, as he
rather grandly informed us without bothering to recreate them, but he provided what was left along with
some inscrutable notes and jottings. (The sole negative one: “Imagine putting Ficino and Pico della Mirandola
in the same sentence!”) But I clearly recall his acute understanding of what I was trying to do in that peculiar
book and the generous enthusiasm he displayed for it.

A few years later Angus was installed as a Getty Fellow in Los Angeles and he invited me down to participate
in a two-day conference. His age, passion, and overall maverick nature made him stick out like a sore thumb
in this setting. He and Michelle, his wife and beloved partner in crime, whispered gleefully that they were
staging a revolt among these buttoned-up, career-oriented young art historians. The outcome of this revolt I
do not know.

Like his other partner in crime Lindsay Waters, Angus was a teen talker on the telephone. It pleases me to
picture the marathon gabfests they must have indulged in over the years, the rich exchange of ideas, gossip,
and magpie free association that helped fuel Angus in achieving the amazing creative outpouring of his final
years. Few scholars can boast of such productivity in the prime of their life, let alone their 70s and 80s.
“Humdinger” is one of those old-fashioned slang words Angus relished using. In August of this year, I sent
him a photo of the magnificent English garden in the backyard behind my flat in Highgate, London, while on
the Guggenheim he helped me get. “This is what I’m enjoying thanks to you,” I wrote him. (He had confided
to Lindsay: “I wrote her a humdinger of a recommendation!”)

Angus. The humdinger.

Victoria Nelson is a writer of fiction, criticism, and memoir. Her most recent books are The Secret Life of
Puppets and Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural. She teaches in Goddard
College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.

JOAN RICHARDSON

Many years ago, in composing a letter in support of his nomination to Distinguished Professor, I observed
that had we in the United States the designation “National Treasure” as they have in Japan my candidate
would be Angus Fletcher. In my now quite long professional career within and without the university I have
yet to encounter another individual so deeply and broadly informed whose full attention was given to the
shapes and strains of thinking as it moves along the horizon where it meets imagination.

The very first lecture I heard Fletcher give, some time in the mid-’70s, was devoted to the line of this activity
which he then described as the “liminal,” taking into account its derivation from the threshold area of a
temple designated by the ancients, the limen, where those who were about to invoke the gods with sacrifice
purified themselves through incantations. His last book, in typescript at the time of his death, is concerned
with what the physicist David Bohm has called the “implicate order,” the invisible but actual trembling power
in which we and all are enfolded, recognizing only its edges and points in the shapes of things we call real.

The consistency of his address to what is, finally, the most essential of our activity as humans, drawing out of
what is not what is, could not be more needed than it is now. Those of us fortunate to have been in his
presence witnessed, in following his words, what thinking looked and sounded like. Those following his words
in print will invoke the presence of his spirit in the liminal space of the page.

Joan Richardson is Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and American Studies at The
Graduate Center CUNY. She is the author, most recently, of Pragmatism and American Experience and The
Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein.

DORION SAGAN

Angus Fletcher was an inspiration to me, an encouragement, and a friend. This last February, he confided, “I
have been writing a strange essay on Whitman and the Wave/Particle Duality, if you can believe it!! but it does
explain partly how he did it.” He asked me from Albuquerque what I was working on, and I gave him a little
annotated list, signing my email back (our last communiqué): “Topologically (sorry I couldn’t resist).” The
reference was to his last book, The Topological Imagination, which I described, in a blurb I was flattered to
give, as, among other things, “an incitement to poeticize,” adding that, “Like his master figure, the sphere,
Fletcher wraps up what was never really apart.” I think some of this feeling applies to my feeling for him
personally, a connection of solidarity-in-di erence, the category-connection, generation-spanning,
discipline-combining kinship of intellectual work that gravitates toward the literary but is not confined to it.

I was a bit of a gumshoe in teasing out little fillips of Angus’s interaction with the currents of French thought
that would become continental philosophy in its literary critical mode. After having heard of the rumor that he
punched Jacques Lacan, I eventually asked him about it. The rumors of his clocking Lacan were, he indicated,
much exaggerated, saying the attack was only verbal and in French; a swearing jag, at a conference in
Maryland, in part precipitated by Lacan’s claim that the unconscious was like Baltimore at 4:00 in the
morning. But Angus then admitted (and perhaps without the arrogance that had motivated his flurry) that,
upon returning to his hotel room, and looking out the window in the wee hours of the morning, he had to
admit that Lacan had a point.

Unapologetically recondite inspiringly interdisciplinary fiercely intellectual humble yet rebellious rigorous
kept me attracted to the figure and person of Angus Fletcher.

Dorion Sagan is a writer, essayist, and editor whose recent books include Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from
the Edges of Science and Lynn Margulis: The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel.

SUSAN STEWART

Angus held sacred what he called “diurnal knowledge.” Looking to journée’s roots in diurnum, thinking of
sundowns, Joseph Conrad, via Angus, comes to mind: “A Landfall might be good or bad.” Now Angus has
made Landfall, his daily path and toil at an end. He has left us with a shelf of his books, each of which sends
us on to more thought, more reading — enough to fill many more journeys, whole lifetimes, of days.

His early studies of Milton and Spenser, his classic work on allegory, his thoughts on Renaissance cosmology,
and the visionary works of his late career, Colors of the Mind and The Topological Imagination, all form a
coherent whole, for in everything he wrote Angus was preoccupied by the integrity of forms, even as they
underwent motion and change.

Always taking pains to distinguish between organic coherence and a mechanistic conformity, he rejected too-
ready — indeed, allegorical — answers. He searched for a capacious, unresolved fit between the complexity of
environments, the myriad di erences between individuals, and the shapes of art.

In a letter I had from him a few years ago, he described his “love for the poetic enterprise, for creating and
recreating its structures and tones, its architecture,” and he explained that, from his perspective, “the heart
of the matter is I am always wondering out loud what visions we humans need, for the better survival of the
species.”

He was an American improver, but little interested in the “better” on a small scale. Scaling up to the cosmos
was Angus’s specialty, and it was the mere possibility of yoking human making to human values — the verum
factum principle he took from his beloved Vico — that excited him.

In his book that has meant the most to me, A New Theory for American Poetry, he writes: “Horizon promises
neither beginning nor end, but only the growing awareness that by describing a circle one has reached beyond
the idea of either beginning or concluding.” Angus was a restless explorer of edges, shores, and infinite lines;
he would not settle for settlement. He was a thinker suited for the New World and he embodied a spirit of the
new that has yet to arrive.

Susan Stewart is a poet, critic, and translator. She is the author, most recently, of Cinder: New and Selected
Poems and The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making. She is Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities
and Director, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University.

LINDSAY WATERS

When I came to the Harvard University Press in 1984 — after finishing my PhD in 1976, and after a stint at
University of Minnesota Press — among the first things I did was check the editorial files on the chance
there’d be a file for Angus. He’d earned his PhD at Harvard under the guidance of “Doc Richards,” as he
always referred to him, sounding respectful in a very old-fashioned way. He’d been one of the few, if not the
only English PhD student who had managed to work with Richards, because the English department at
Harvard forbid any student to study with him; they refused to acknowledge this superstar of literary studies
who had been forced upon them by a dean convinced that Harvard students should learn about the “New
Criticism” that was all the rage in the English departments worldwide, except Harvard. Criticism, which
Richards represented, was never going to find a place in a department dedicated to real scholarship. Their
bullheadedness was matched and beaten by Angus’s determination to study with Doc Richards.

Now that he has passed away I feel I am coming to know him in a new way. When I dug into that file, I
discovered that he had submitted the dissertation to Harvard, and the press had turned it down. The reason
they turned it down was what made me angry. The killer review of the book was a long, detailed, supremely
reasonable review by the scholar who had the most to lose if Angus’s book came out in glory from Harvard.
to him at the hands of my unsuspecting predecessors at the Harvard Press that made me determine to right
this wrong, if I could. A murder mystery needs to be written …

So I planned to meet him, and we did meet for a co ee at the old Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street in New
York. I felt I was meeting J. D. Salinger or one of the Glass Family. Or Coleridge. Or Aschenbach or Tadzio — if
he ever paused to let someone approach him — from one of Angus’s favorite movies, Death in Venice.

In no time, Angus put together his book, Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature. What I did
not know was that Angus had met his wife in Berkeley in 1989, and he’d been, I don’t think it is an
exaggeration to say, reborn intellectually. I was lucky: I connected to him when he was ready to think about
books with a new determination.

He became productive, very productive, when he caught his second wind, all the while railing about how the
neoliberal (a word he never used) university was encouraging mindless production of readerless publications.
I influenced him by finding ways to get him to write and thereby exercise his imagination, and he influenced
me to think about my work as a publisher. I, too, had a second career after I met him. At Minnesota, I
published literary theory. At Harvard, I worked intensely with a theorist and really learned what theory was. I
happily transitioned from the frying pan into the fire. He had thought deeply about the damage being caused
to the academic world by the empty focus on numbers. This became a main theme of my Enemies of Promise.
But adjacent to that was what I learned seeing Angus, a person who had so much to say, but had become
unable to say it thanks to witnessing the wild and obscene proliferation of numbers of books and essays.

Our constant topic was the necessity to revive the appreciation of poetry and aesthetic theory against the tide
of moralizing that substituted for critical thought. He showed me how criticism had to be rooted in feeling.
When I say show, let me show you what I mean. I was writing an essay to attack a book I thought was a piece
of pseudo-theorizing, the kind of thinking Angus had labeled the “barbarism of reflection, the curse of a
sophisticatical, depleted rationality.” The book I was trying to attack was Walter Benn Michaels’s The Shape
of the Signifier. I was trying to attack it by coming up with ideas to counter the book’s sophistry, but I felt I
was missing my target. I called up Angus several times to ask him to commiserate with me. I called and talked
and we got nowhere. I was getting frustrated. He was listening. Finally he said to me, “How does reading that
stu make you feel?” Why do you ask me? I told him. I refused to answer his question, but he kept repeating it
to me. Finally, I said, “It makes me angry.” And he said, “Good. We are getting somewhere. In dealing with
complex things, you have to keep to the principle of keeping it simple. Talk about your anger. In the ancient
world, there was a school of rhetoricians who trained speakers to say things to their audiences that would
outrage and thus disarm them. This method of Michaels is a well-known strategy. Talk about your anger.”

Angus insisted upon the importance of the emotional. This little exchange with him exhibits his varying the
rhythm of talk that made talking with him an emotional event. He said consider the rhythm of a basketball
game. Almost all the game takes place in a mad rush up and down the court, but the game can always be
interrupted by a free throw that gives the game a moment of repose when all the players cease moving and
pause for one player to take a shot, and they never take them quickly. That moment of repose is crucial to how
a game feels to players and fans.

Thus Angus could stop me from thinking frantically about how to outplay Michaels. He made me pause for my
moment of Zen. Now Angus is pausing, having had some repose forced on him, but he will be back in our
hearts and souls soon, helping us think, as he did best of anyone I have known.

Lindsay Waters is executive editor for the Humanities at the Harvard University Press and author of Enemies
of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship.
 Photograph: James Peters

ERIC WILSON

Of Angus Fletcher, poet John Hollander wrote, his “very asides and footnotes have been, for a generation of
interpreters, oracular.” This is not hyperbole. Angus is one of the very few literary critics of the past 50 years
(Northrop Frye and Allen Grossman join him) whose works transcend scholarly specialization, or even genre,
to reach the status of literature: visionary and measured and strange. But really Angus was no more bound to
this generation than he was to genre. In books ranging from Allegory to Colors of the Mind to A New Theory
for American Poetry, Angus channeled those labyrinthine Renaissance anatomists Burton and Browne,
revealing the eccentric networks encompassing what we thought we knew.

“Labyrinthine” also describes the way Angus taught. When I first matriculated to the PhD program in English
at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a professor told me I should take Angus’s seminar
on the Renaissance. I told her I was interested in Romanticism. She said you don’t take Angus’s classes for the
subject you take them for Angus She was right I can’t remember the names of the classes I took but I can
It was in Angus’s class that I first read Borges’s Labyrinths, which features “Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote,” about a translator of Cervantes who immersed himself so deeply into his rendering that he wanted
to reproduce, line by line, in the Spanish of Cervantes, the exact Don Quixote itself. “He did not,” Borges’s
narrator writes, “want to compose another Quixote — which is easy — but the Quixote itself.”

Angus read aloud the passage in this story where Borges quotes a passage from Cervantes and then what is
seemingly the exact same passage from Menard. Angus read in a resonant, slightly hesitant, melancholy yet
a rmative voice, after which the class sat in stunned silence, before Angus gave a gentle chuckle, to save us
from awkwardness but also to acknowledge that something really wondrous had just occurred. Remarkably, in
reading both passages — one by Cervantes, the other by Menard — in exactly the same way, he had captured
perfectly their vast distance in depth and meaning.

I became hyper-attentive to everything Angus said. I didn’t know when he might, like a Zen master, utter
some koan-esque phrase that would alter, as might a pair of colored glasses, everything I thereafter
witnessed.

One day, he brought in a copy of some tabloid. On the cover was a cloud formation resembling a giant demon.
The headline read, “Satan Appears in Cloud.” Angus said, “I saw this and wondered, ‘What does it mean, to
appear?’” Yes, I thought. Think of how we use the verb “appear.” A ghost appears. A celebrity appears. A
relative, though, shows up. And I, when entering a room, enter, just as I, attending a party, attend.

Another time, on the day before Thanksgiving, just as we were shu ing out of class, Angus said, “Well, once
a friend of mine told me that if you’re going to cook a turkey, just put it in the oven and leave it in there for
four hours and it will be cooked.” Was this just a bland description of what happens when you cook a turkey,
or a deep statement on the nature of existence?

Angus’s books intensify his pedagogical uncanny. I certainly read them for information — they are profound
works of scholarship — but I read them more for inspiration, an intellectual superabundance that makes me
say yes to my own mind’s more humble e orts. Without Angus, I never would have understood the
exuberance of writing.

Eric Wilson is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. His recent books include Everyone Loves a Good
Train Wreck; or, Why We Can’t Stop Looking at Terrible Things and The Mercy of Eternity: A Memoir of
Depression and Grace.

MICHAEL WOOD

I hadn’t seen Angus recently, but I have been reading him constantly over the years, and was delighted when
my fellow judges agreed that his book A New Theory for American Poetry was the obvious choice for the
Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2005.

My chief memories of Angus go back much further, though, to the time when we were at Columbia together. I
arrived in the summer of 1964, and I think Angus had been appointed two or three years before that. His
marvelous book on allegory came out in 1964, and he got tenure in 1968.

The intellectual company in that place, at that time, was amazing. This was my first encounter with the
United States. I had come from Cambridge, England, and thought I knew what lively minds looked like, and
how their owners talked. It turned out that I didn’t even know what a lively mind was. The wonderful,
infinitely varied conversations were an everyday revelation. Each person I met, it seemed, thought better,
faster, and more amply than anyone I had previously known, and what’s more they were all di erent from
each other. Everyone had just read a book he or she wanted to talk about, and since most of us were teaching
the Columbia College Humanities course, we were constantly swapping ideas about how to approach some
classic or other: a new angle on Oedipus, a way of rescuing Virgil from his apparent apologia for empire.

Even in this dazzling company, Angus was an exception. Genial, funny, relaxed, slightly detached from the
world, and infinitely learned, he could do in reality what the legend of those days said all assistant professors
at Columbia were able to do: talk intelligently about anything in the world for 10 minutes. Most of us could
fake this — it’s not a negligible feat — but we were certainly faking, and the 10 minutes could seem long.
whatever kind of knowledge it was, and wherever he had picked it up. It was stu to think with, as well as
stu to think about.

You have only to glance at a page of his first book to get a feeling of this mental style. Illustrating the variety
of literary forms that make use of allegory, Angus mentions Lucian, Swift, Jules Verne, Henri Michaux, genteel
whodunits, hard-boiled detective stories, fairy tales, medieval poetry, Yeats, and Allen Ginsberg. These names
are not just illustrations. They are markers for all kinds of speculative, acrobatic leaps of thought. One of the
delights of talking to Angus was that you never knew where the conversation would go, what brilliant and
unlikely concept he would invite you to consider.

For a man of such adventurous mind, he could be admirably unru ed when necessary. I recall an occasion —
this would have been in the 1970s some time — when a distinguished visitor was lecturing us on our failings
as literary scholars and critics. We overproduced, all we had to o er was a mass of mediocre material,
cluttering the libraries and our minds. We felt appropriately upbraided and downcast. So true. And what was to
be done? Angus, who seemed to have been asleep during the talk, but obviously hadn’t been, asked the
speaker if he knew that the current wisdom in areas like the writing of science fiction was that only 10 percent
of what was published was any good. Angus thought this might also be true of literary scholarship, indeed
might be true in almost any area. If so, then all that mattered was that the standards were maintained for the
10 percent. There might even be an advantage in overproduction, since 10 percent of a larger total would be
welcome. Why hadn’t we thought of that? Angus grinned amiably, and seemed to go back to sleep.

Michael Wood is the author, most recently, of On Empson. He is Professor of English and Comparative
Literature Emeritus at Princeton University.

¤
 Photograph: Mark Forte

Angus Fletcher 1930-2016

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