I took an outstanding Latin course on Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses from Dartmouth Classics Professor Edward Bradley in the winter of 1970 — that’s me with my old copy of the Metamorphoses in the photo with Professor Bradley at the left. Forty-two years later — in the fall of 2012 — my youngest daughter took introductory Latin with none other than Professor Bradley.
Hearing my daughter talk about Professor Bradley brought back a lot of memories. Metamorphoses, there’ve been a few. One thing, however, hadn’t changed. According to my daughter, Dartmouth students viewed Professor Bradley with the same mixture of respect and affection that I have for him. At the conclusion of the introductory Latin class, his students petitioned the Classics department to ask him to teach the next Latin course in the sequence the following term.
When I visited my daughter at school in February 2012, I asked Professor Bradley if he would meet me for coffee. He suggested something “more spirituous.” We met at the bar of a nice restaurant on Main Street in Hanover. He didn’t remember me from Adam, but he remembered the 1970 Ovid class and one of my fellow students in the class, Karl Maurer.
Karl taught Classics at the University of Dallas. Professor Bradley warmly recalled Karl as the best Classics student he ever had. I regret to note that Karl died in 2015. The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine carried an obituary that captured some of his spirit.
Professor Bradley loves teaching undergraduates. His former students are some of his best friends. Seven of them joined him for dinner when he formally retired from the faculty in 2006. No pun intended, he is a classic Dartmouth teacher. If the school is good, it’s because of teachers like him.
When we met up in 2012, I told Professor Bradley how much his Ovid class had meant to me. He conveyed a love of the poetry. He inspired me to study ancient Greek and encouraged my interest in writing. His comments on my paper for the class have stayed stuck in my head over the years. He told me he was delighted to hear how I remembered his class — he felt that he hadn’t matured yet as a teacher. At the time it was 42 years before. The concept of “metamorphoses” applies.
Dear reader, my personal encounter with Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the admittedly lame pretext for recommending David Lehman’s current New Criterion essay “Ovid in exile” (“On Columbia’s cancellation of the Latin poet”). It is an excellent essay on the decline of higher education at schools such as Columbia.
The New Criterion’s capsule biography of Lehman is of interest as well: “David Lehman was educated at Columbia and Cambridge universities. The Morning Line is the most recent of his poetry collections; his prose books include One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir, Sinatra’s Century, and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. In 1988 he launched The Best American Poetry and was general editor of the annual anthology series for the next thirty-eight years. Lehman has also edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry and a number of anthologies devoted to prose poems, erotic verse, and poetic form. For A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, he received the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP in 2010.” I read Signs of the Times as soon as it came out in paperback in 1992 and highly recommend it.
