Arts and Letters

There was no one quite like him. I first met him in the autumn of 1924, just after he had come to New York to take on a job teaching Latin, at Woodmere Academy, on Long Island. Born in Pennsylvania, he had taught in secondary schools in San Francisco, after his graduation (cum laude) from Amherst, his father's college. He had met Genevieve Taggard, in San Francisco, and had attended her poetry workshop (then a rare project). He was soon introduced to a group of young poets in New York, and with this group later helped to edit The Measure, a magazine of verse.

Rolfe presented, in those days, a seemingly uncomplicated attitude toward life and art. He was continually belying what was patently a gentle and cultivated nature by flights of rather tough and fanciful humor. He was interested in baseball, in the racetrack, in vaudeville and musical revues; and he used these locales in his work, long before pop art existed. He could speak the American vernacular with skill, in a period when American poets were not giving "slang" much attention. He seemed somewhat older than the rest of us, and had not escaped the experience of a spell in the army (as a first lieutenant) in 1917-1918.

But behind his fun and games the serious classical scholar already existed; and his second book Out of the Jewel (1942) displays his lyric endowment in full phase. His love for the full galaxy of Latin poets is beginning to be evident. And we must remember that Rolfe came into classic learning very early. "My father taught me some Latin before I could read, and one of my earliest books was a Latin primer." His father taught high-school Latin in a Pennsylvania town where much of Rolfe's boyhood was spent; his mother "taught the English."

The period of Rolfe's remarkable translations began, oddly enough, with a rendering of García Lorca at his most surrealist (The Poet in New York). A splendid version of The Aeneid followed, to be joined, as the years passed, by two works of Ovid, the Satires of Juvenal, and finally, after his retirement, by a remarkable Lucretius. And honors began to come to him, beginning with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1938, when he went to Italy and Greece—going on to membership in our Institute.

Hard work in a variety of fields characterized his career: editor, anthologist, teacher, translator. The essential Rolfe never changed. He continued to live simply, and to encourage young talent. He wrote wonderful letters, and even in his last, difficult illness, would write post cards filled with his old sense of absurdity. And we must not pass over his principal later interest: his discovery of his Welsh heritage and his work with the intricate forms of Welsh balladry.

His last years were happy ones. He returned to Amherst to teach and to receive a long overdue honorary degree. There was tragedy in the death of his son. But it was an indomitable man and an unforgettable poet who recently left us. I miss him very much. Ave atque vale.