RMMLA Past Presidents: VI: Edward L. Hart, 1957-1958

RMMLA PAST PRESIDENTS: VI EDWARD L. HART, 1957-1958 Edward L. Hart is an individual of unusual breadth, as a scholar-teacher and as a man, resulting from his capacity to seize experience, however it confronts him, and turn it to some intellectual , esthetic, or avocational account . Thus his interest and activities range from Shakespearean drama to Japanese poetry, from eighteenth-century biography to rocks and fossils. Dr. Hart was born in the Mormon village of Bloomington in southeastern Idaho in 1916. Like many others whose experience ultimately draws them to literature and language, he first graduated with a degree in what appeared to be remote from the humanities, a B.S. in economics, from the University of Utah in 1939. Yet breadth of interest characterized his undergraduate years, and it was not an intellectual crisis which brought him to English literature: during his senior year he was captain of the track team and conference champion miler; the same year he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and selected as a Rhodes Scholar. JHe had already developed what has become a life-long interest in rocks, minerals, and fossils in an undergraduate geology class under Frederick J. Pack, to whose museum he brought buffalo bones and skulls found on a ranch where he worked summers. Appropriately, years later his interest in rock hounding led to a continuing friendship within English scholarly circles when, after a particularly heated and frustrating executive council meeting of the MLA during his term as president of RMMLA, he noticed that another of the discontented participants, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., was carrying a paperback volume on rocks and minerals. His discovery of their second mutual interest—the first was eighteenth-century biography—salvaged their equilibrium for the day and began what is already a decade of cross-continental exchange. When the entrance of England into World War II postponed Mr. Hart's study at Oxford, he took an M.A. degree in English at the University of Michigan, completed in 1941. With America's entry into the war he became a translator and interpreter of Japanese for the U.S. Naval Reserve in which he served until the war's end. His love of Japanese arts, particularly poetry, stems from his war training and experience, ordinarily more likely to induce an aversion than a love for the culture of the enemy. During his naval duty in Washington he met and married Eleanor May Coleman. They have since shared an interest in music. Both have Edward L. Hart91 played for over a decade in a recorder group. When Mrs. Hart performs with the local symphony, Dr. Hart is always on hand for the concert. The Harts have a neatly balanced family of four children—sons Richard and Paul, daughters Barbara and Patricia—all of whom share the broad interests of their parents. With the war's end, however, Oxford could once again honor die scholarships awarded at the war's outbreak; even better, those scholars whose studies had been deferred were permitted to bring their wives and children. The Harts moved to England, and the second of their children was born at Oxford. After three years at Oxford (1946-1949), the Harts moved to Seattle, where Dr. Hart taught for three years at the University of Washington. At the end of his first year at Washington he returned to Oxford for his doctor's orals, surely, as Dr. Hart says, "one of the longest trips for an oral that anyone has taken." Three months later he was granted die D.Phil, degree by Oxford University. After two more years of teaching at the University of Washington, Dr. Hart moved to Brigham Young University at Provo, Utah, where he now teaches. He has taught also as visiting professor at the University of California (Berkeley) and Arizona State University at Tempe. He received a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1942 and a research grant from the American Philosophical Society in 1964. Besides articles and poems published in PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly, American Oxonian, and several other journals, and papers at regional and national MLA and other society meetings, Dr. Hart's latest work, a book enti...