William Ellery Leonard

William Ellery Channing Leonard was born on the family homestead in Plainfield, New Jersey on January 25, 1876. His parents, admirers of the transcendentalist movement, named him after William Ellery Channing, a mentor to Ralph Waldo Emerson. His father, William James Leonard, was a newspaper editor. However, by 1890, he was unable to financially support his family with this profession. Three years later, he returned to ministry. He accepted an appointment with a Unitarian church in Bolton's Landing, Massachusetts and moved the family there. He joined Phineas Quimby's New Thought movement and left the Unitarian church in 1898. Leonard's mother, Mattie, was a proponent of the pseudoscientific study of graphology and taught kindergarten. Leonard attended his mother's class for five years, studied with his father at home, and did not enter public school until he was nine.{{sfn|Reinitz|2013|pp=32–34}}

During his adolescence, Leonard gained an appreciation for literature. Frustrated that his impoverished parents could not afford college, Leonard took a job out of high school as a door-to-door salesman. On a day off, he took a trip to Boston to visit the Massachusetts Genealogical Society. However, his guidebook had the wrong address and Leonard instead wound up at the College of Liberal Arts at Boston University. A clerk invited Leonard to speak with the dean of the school, who offered Leonard a tuition scholarship.{{sfn|Reinitz|2013|p=38}} Leonard wrote over 200 poems while in school, and his "Parson Moody's Prayer" was published in The Century Magazine in 1899. He was also the editor of the university biweekly newspaper, the University Beacon.{{sfn|Reinitz|2013|p=40}}

Leonard received his B.A. from Boston University in 1898. Harvard University, impressed with Leonard's undergraduate achievements, offered to allow Leonard to study there for a master's degree in one year, instead of the customary two. While studying there, Leonard was offered a temporary position to replace a professor of Latin at Boston University.{{sfn|Reinitz|2013|p=45}} After graduating from Harvard and completing his temporary professorship, Leonard took a job in a small high school in Plainville, Massachusetts. Leonard was awarded with a postgraduate fellowship from Boston University that allowed him to study in a foreign university. He spent two years in Germany on the scholarship.{{sfn|Reinitz|2013|pp=46–47}} Leonard engaged in graduate studies at both the University of Bonn and Göttingen University, and earned his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1904.{{Cite news |last=Taylor |first=Mat-Moore |title=William Ellery Leonard, U.W. Poet, Dies at 68 |url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/82963970/mat-moore-taylor-leonhard-obituary/ |publication-date=May 2, 1944 |work=Wisconsin State Journal |via=Newspapers.com |page=1}} His dissertation was on the influence of Lord Byron on the American poetry movement from 1815 to 1860.{{sfn|Reinitz|2013|p=55}}

File:Empedocles-5.jpg

File:Empedocles-6.jpg]]

In 1906, Leonard accepted a position as assistant professor of english at the University of Wisconsin. He was recruited by Charles R. Van Hise, whose Wisconsin Idea dictated that research would be a cornerstone of the university. He befriended graduate student Leonard Bloomfield, with whom he would maintain a lifelong friendship. Leonard published his first book of poems as Sonnets and Poems to little fanfare in 1906. Among his prominent students at Wisconsin were literary critic Leslie Fiedler, activist Carl Haessler, poet Marya Zaturenska, activist Mildred Harnack, and poet Clara Leiser,{{cite web|url=http://www.traces.org/castofcharacters.html|title=RESISTING HITLER: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra Cast of Characters|author=Shareen Blair Brysac|author-link=Shareen Blair Brysac|year=2000|work=TRACES|access-date=January 3, 2014|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140128104239/http://www.traces.org/castofcharacters.html|archive-date=January 28, 2014|url-status=dead}} the latter two outspoken opponents of Nazism.

Over his career Leonard wrote numerous volumes of poetry, the first of which was Sonnets and Poems, a collection regarded as showing emotional intensity as well as psychological depth. He is most remembered, however, for Two Lives, a cycle of 250 sonnets telling the story of his tragic marriage. Stephen Vincent Benét called it the best American poem of the twentieth century. In his psychological autobiography, The Locomotive-God, he probed his agoraphobia. Leonard is also known for his many scholarly works, particularly translations of Aesop, Empedocles, and Lucretius (e.g. {{Lang|la|De rerum natura}}) as well as the epic Beowulf.

Leonard suffered from lifelong agoraphobia, which not only kept him confined to the area of his home and university campus but increased with age to the point that, in the last years of his life, he conducted all lectures from his home. He married Charlotte Freeman, the daughter of his landlord, in 1909. The marriage was short-lived, however; she committed suicide on May 4, 1910.{{cite book |title= The Life and Work of Ludwig Lewisohn|last= Melnick|first= Ralph|volume= I: "A Touch of Wildness" |year= 1998|publisher= Wayne State University Press|location= Detroit, MI|isbn= 0-8143-2692-7|url= https://books.google.com/books?id=kVulUT-HfTcC&q=Ludwig+Lewisohn+1955&pg=PA23|access-date=July 11, 2010}} From 1914 until their divorce in 1934, he was married to Charlotte Charlton.[https://web.archive.org/web/20101014091412/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,763954,00.html "Milestones, May 6, 1940,"] Time, May 6, 1940, accessed May 26, 2010. In 1935, he married a student, Grace Golden, who divorced him two years later.[https://web.archive.org/web/20120125031658/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,758119,00.html "Milestones, August 9, 1937,"] Time, August 9, 1937, accessed May 26, 2010. Three years after that, he remarried his second wife.

Leonard died of a heart attack in Madison, Wisconsin on May 2, 1944.{{Cite news |title=Prof. William Ellery Leonard Famous Literary, Campus Figure, Dies Today at 68 |url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/82963773/william-ellery-leonhard-obituary/ |publication-date=May 2, 1944 |work=The Capital Times |location=Madison, Wisconsin |via=Newspapers.com |page=1}} A newspaper commented that his death had freed him "from the phobic prison he had occupied for years."

Today the William Ellery Leonard House is on the list of Registered Historic Places in Madison, Wisconsin.

• Byron and Byronism in America (1905—Columbia University dissertation)
• Sonnets and Poems (1906)
• [https://libserv.aip.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1668O33395J5H.322504&profile=rev-all&source=~!horizon&view=subscriptionsummary&uri=full=3100006~!44487~!1&ri=2&aspect=power&menu=search&ipp=20&spp=20&staffonly=&term=empedocles&index=.GW&uindex=&aspect=power&menu=search&ri=2 The Fragments of Empedocles] (1908)
• Aesop and Hyssop (1912)
• The Vaunt of Man (1912)
• [https://www.questia.com/library/book/socrates-master-of-life-by-william-ellery-leonard.jsp Socrates, Master of Life] (1915)
• "Bryant and the Minor Poets," Book II, Chapter V of The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–1921)
• The Lynching Bee (1920)
• Tutankhamen and After (1924)
• Two Lives (1925)
• The Locomotive-God (1927)
• Translation of Lucretius' [https://web.archive.org/web/20110130232608/http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lucretius/l94o/complete.html Of the Nature of Things] (1916)
• [http://www.beowulftranslations.net/leon.shtml Beowulf: A New Verse Translation for Fireside and Class Room] (1923)
• A Son of Earth Collected Poems (1928)
• Gilgamesh: Epic of Old Babylonia (1934)
• A Man Against Time (1945)

{{Reflist}}

• {{cite book|last=Reinitz|first=Neale|title=William Ellery Leonard: The Professor and the Locomotive-God|year=2013|publisher=Farleigh Dickinson University Press|place=Lanham, MD|isbn=978-1-61147-588-3}}

• Daniel S. Burt, editor, The Chronology of American Literature. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004.
• Chester E. Jorgenson, "William Ellery Leonard: An Appraisal" in Studies in Honor of John Wilcox by A. Dale Wallace and Woodbrun O. Ross. Detroit: Wayne State University press, 1958.
• Chauncey D. Leake, [http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/UW.v77i4 "1876-1944 William Ellery Leonard: Tormented Genius of the Midlands"] in Wisconsin Alumnus 77:4, 1976.
• The Columbia Encyclopedia Third Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963.
• [http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0829432.html The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia] Sixth Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

• {{DBCS}}
• [http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/dictionary/index.asp?action=view&term_id=2571&search_term=leonard Leonard, William Ellery 1876 - 1944] at Dictionary of Wisconsin History
• [http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/wlhba/searchResults.asp?adv=yes&fn=william&ln=leonard Newspaper articles about William Leonard]
• {{Gutenberg author | id=415}}
• {{Internet Archive author |sname=William Ellery Leonard |sopt=t}}
• {{Librivox author |id=6408}}
• [http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/Literature/Literature-idx?type=div&did=LITERATURE.V27I01.JOHNSONLOCOMOTIE&isize=M&pview=hide Review of The Locomotive God], Wisconsin Literary Magazine

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Category:1876 births

Category:1944 deaths

Category:20th-century American poets

Category:Poets from New Jersey

Category:Poets from Wisconsin

Category:Writers from Plainfield, New Jersey

Category:Boston University College of Arts and Sciences alumni

Category:Harvard University alumni

Category:University of Göttingen alumni

Category:Columbia University alumni

Category:University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty

Category:Translators from Old English

Category:University of Bonn alumni

Category:20th-century American translators