Charlton Miner Lewis

Lewis, born on March 4, 1866, in Brooklyn, New York, was the younger of two sons of Charlton Thomas Lewis and his first wife, Nancy Dunlap McKeen Lewis. His father was a professor of mathematics and Greek at Troy University and later practiced law. Lewis attended Yale University and graduated with a B.A. in 1886. He attended graduate school at Yale for a year as a Clark Scholar. He studied law at Columbia University and received his LL.B. in 1889. He passed the bar and worked as a lawyer until 1894.{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=lXkK4MJbqZ4C&pg=PA751 |pages=751–53 |title=Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale University |publisher=Yale University |location=New Haven |year=1921}}

In 1894 he was hired by Yale as an English instructor and spent a year in New York City, preparing for his appointment, which he took up in 1895. He was simultaneously enrolled in the Ph.D. program, and earned that degree in 1898; in that same year he was appointed as assistant professor. From 1899 until his death he occupied the Emily Sanford Professorship of English Literature. During that period he also served as chair of the English Department and as chair of the English faculty in Yale's graduate school.

Lewis specialized in versification and meter, and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation, published in 1898, on the subject of the influence of French and Latin verse on the English iambic line; in The foreign sources of modern English versification he attempted to explain the metrical origins and qualities of English verse and argued that the influence of French in the Middle English period was formative in the development of English verse. One of his roles was to serve as the first judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets;{{cite book |editor-last=Bradley |editor-first=George |editor-link=George Bradley (poet) |title=The Yale Younger Poets Anthology |year=1998 |publisher=Yale University Press |url=https://archive.org/details/yaleyoungerpoets00brad |isbn=0-300-07472-7 |via=the Internet Archive {{registration required}} }} he also edited the commemorative volume for Yale's bicentennial celebration, and Macbeth for the Yale Shakespeare. In 1904 he published a "retelling" of the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as Gawayne and the Green Knight, and in 1916 he published three poems on Sir Gawain.{{cite book |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hf6zAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA143 |chapter=English, Arthurian Literature in (Modern) |pages=136–44 |author-link=Raymond H. Thompson |first=Raymond H. |last=Thompson |title=The New Arthurian Encyclopedia |edition=new |editor1-first=Norris J. |editor1-last=Lacy |editor2-first=Geoffrey |editor2-last=Ashe |editor3-first=Sandra Ness |editor3-last=Ihle |editor4-first=Marianne E. |editor4-last=Kalinke |editor5-first=Raymond H. |editor5-last=Thompson |publisher=Routledge |year=2013 |isbn=9781136606335}} His 1907 publication The Genesis of Hamlet, according to one reviewer, "helps us to understand the famous mystery of the melancholy Prince of Denmark".{{cite magazine |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9S4_AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA268 |page=268 |title=Some New Light on the Mystery of Hamlet, From the Pen of Professor Charlton Lewis |first=Richard |last=Burton |date=March 7, 1908 | magazine=The Bellman |volume=4}}

In 1917 he wrote the foreword for A Book of Verse of the Great War, edited by William Reginald Wheeler; in it he praised Edith M. Thomas's "A Woman's Cry", though lumping her with the pacifists{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_nIkCcLM5yQC&pg=PA146 |page=146 |title=Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War |series=Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture |first=Mark W. |last=van Wienen |publisher=Cambridge UP |year=1997 |isbn=9780521563963}} of whom he said that "happily [they] are a minority sect"; Ridgely Torrence and Edith Thomas were singled out from other pacifists because "in pacifists of this type there is nothing contemptible except their logic".{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8ENCAAAAIAAJ&pg=PR7 |title=A Book of Verse of the Great War |editor1-first=William Reginald |editor1-last=Wheeler |publisher=Yale UP |year=1917 |page=xx}}

He died of complications from influenza on March 12, 1923, at his home in New Haven, Connecticut and was buried at Grove Street Cemetery.{{Cite book |url=https://archive.org/details/b2900035x_0003/mode/2up |title=Universities and their Sons |publisher=R. Herndon Company |others=Introduction by William Torrey Harris |year=1899 |editor-last=Chamberlain |editor-first=Joshua L. |editor-link=Joshua Chamberlain |volume=III |editor-last2=Wingate |editor-first2=Charles E. L. |editor-last3=Williams |editor-first3=Jesse Lynch |editor-link3=Jesse Lynch Williams |editor-last4=Lee |editor-first4=Albert |editor-last5=Paine |editor-first5=Henry G.}} Some of his poems, which had been published in Harper's Magazine, The Yale Review, and other outlets, were gathered with his Gawayne and the Green Knight in a volume, Poems, edited by Henry Augustin Beers and published by Yale University Press the year after his death.{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=sj1AAAAAIAAJ |chapter=Foreword |first=Henry A. |last=Beers | title=Charlton Miner Lewis: Poems |publisher= Yale UP |location=New Haven |year=1924}}

• The Foreign Sources of Modern English Versification ([https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000915545 New York, H. Holt, 1898])
• The Beginnings of English Literature ([https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000915954 Boston, Ginn, 1900], repr. 1901)
• Gawayne and the Green Knight: A Fairy Tale (a retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and company, 1903, 1904; [https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009566168 Yale UP, 1916])
• The Genesis of Hamlet ([https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001017762 New York, H. Holt, 1907])
• The Principles of English Verse ([https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001441529 New York, H. Holt, 1906])
• The Record of the Celebration of the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Founding of Yale College, Held at Yale university, in New Haven, Connecticut, October the Twentieth to October the Twenty-third A.D. Nineteen Hundred and One ([https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006532162 New Haven, Yale UP, 1902])
• The Tragedy of Macbeth ([https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100326413 New Haven: Yale UP, 1918])
• Poems ([https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006608702 New Haven, Yale UP, 1924])

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Category:1866 births

Category:1923 deaths

Category:American academics of English literature

Category:Yale University alumni

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Category:19th-century American lawyers