Introduction

William Kerrigan Introduction As all contributors to this book know from experience, Edward William Tayler is a great and original teacher. He was funny, he was unpredictable, and though usually clear, he was also just mysterious enough to keep students wondering about revelations still to come rather than dwelling complacently on yesterday's teachings. A common vice among professors is to say all they know in the first five or six classes, then exemplify it for the rest of the term. Tayler, like an intellectual dramatist, planned in long sweeping lines, and like a good actor, kept to the script. He was endlessly promising. But just when you had had enough of irony's promises, suddenly he was direct and moving. He seemed to know why he was there. The process of coming to understand a great literary work is demanding but worthwhile, since the work, once apprehended, transforms the mind ever thereafter by becoming a part of it: a play within the play. The study of literature is the formation of selves. We hesitate to descend to quantification, but some of the truth is there. He has directed around fifty dissertations, served on the committees of hundreds more, directed hundreds and hundreds of Master's theses, and taught thousands of Columbia College students, most of them in his remarkable twin year-long courses in the complete works of Shakespeare and Milton. The selfless giving of his vibrancy to students has not faltered for forty years. Hired in 1960, retired in 1999, he continues to teach courses at various levels of the Columbia University curriculum. We hesitate to descend to the catalogue of public honors, since, as Matthew Arnold memorably noted of growing old, It is — last stage of all — When we are frozen up within, and quite viiiWilliam Kerrigan The phantom of ourselves, To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost, Which blamed the living man. But some of the truth is there. In 1985 he received the Great Teacher award of Columbia University's Society of Older Graduates. A year later the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching, Scholarship, and Leadership came his way. He was the Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America in 1989. In 1996 he was the recipient of Columbia's Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. He was cited again in 1998 for Distinguished Service to the Core Curriculum, an award that acknowledged not only his career-long commitment to the ethos of Columbia's core curriculum but also his service to the Logic and Rhetoric Program, which he designed. He is the most decorated teacher in the history of Columbia University. We hesitate to descend to publication, but some of the truth is there. In his three books Tayler has explored the impact on literary form of the Renaissance's fundamental vocabularies for thinking and judging. As he tells graduate students, "Don't historicize, don't contextualize: philologizel" His work is erudite, in places fantastically so, but also shot through with humor. He may, for instance, be the only scholar to have begun three books with versions of the same sentence. Both Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature and Milton's Poetry: Its Development in Time start (with tiny differences) as follows: "Perhaps Aristotle was right in supposing that nature reveals itself ever and everywhere the same, just as fire burns both here and in Persia."1 The "perhaps" is characteristic; the determination to begin with Aristotle, with the fountainheads of Western tradition, is characteristic; the idea, albeit skeptically entertained, that there might be constants beneath the ceaseless flux of history, is a little less characteristic, and in context quickly gives way to Tayler's distinctive pursuit of the alien mind through the language of its self-descriptions. His most recent book, Donne's Idea ofa Woman: Structure and Meaning in The Anniversaries, begins with what appears on first glance to be an intellectual decision, canceling the old "perhaps": "Doubtless Aristotle should not have assumed that nature remains always and everywhere the same, just as fire burns both here and in Persia."2 But this turns out to be irony, opening a long reflection on recent trends in academic thinking that would...