Leslie J. Savage Library: Weismiller Press Release

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing

January 25, 2012 / FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Western State Receives Literary Archive from the Weismiller Family

The family of the late Edward Weismiller (1915 – 2010) has generously donated over 170 publications from Weismiller’s personal library to Western State College of Colorado. The gift was facilitated by Dana Gioia, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and a member of the Advisory Board of the Poetry Concentration in Western’s MFA. Gioia comments that “I was delighted to bring this important collection to this important new writing program. Western Colorado deserves a legacy such as this, that combines scholarship and creativity.”

Weismiller was an award-winning poet and a literary scholar of the first order, especially in the field of literary prosody and the study of English poet John Milton. In 1936, when he was just 20, he was the youngest Yale Younger Poet ever chosen (by series editor Stephen Vincent Benét), and the donated collection includes a rare 1936 edition of his prize-winning volume, The Deer Come Down. Weismiller held degrees from Cornell College, Harvard, and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. During WW II, he was awarded a Bronze Star and the Medaille de la Reconnaissance Francaise for his work in counterespionage with the OSS and the Marines, experiences reflected in his 1962 novel The Serpent Sleeping. After the war and the completion of his degrees, he taught at Pomona College and later George Washington University, while continuing to publish poetry, fiction, translations and scholarship. He served as one editor of the Variorum Milton, and won the 2001 Robert Fitzgerald Award for lifetime contribution to the study of literary prosody. In the course of his career he also won a Guggenheim, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant and a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. Terry Brogan, the Editor of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, once remarked that Weismiller was the greatest living scholar of literary prosody.

Published between the 1850’s and 1990’s, most of the donated works concern Milton and the study of literary prosody. Among them are a 1943 four-volume facsimile edition of Milton’s Poetical Works and a 1923 three-volume set of History of English Prosody by George Saintsbury. The non-circulating collection will be housed in the Leslie J. Savage Library’s rare books department and will available as a resource for all guests of the library.

David J. Rothman, the Director of the Poetry Concentration, comments that “This generous gift makes Western one of the preeminent resources for the study of literary prosody in the entire region. As this is one of the major focuses of our program, the collection will be a wonderful resource for our students and for the entire Western Community.”

Nancy Gauss, Director of Library Services at Western, states that “Savage Library is grateful to have received this donation from the Weismiller family and excited to have such a fine research collection available to Western State College’s MFA students and researchers.”

The books will be available through the library’s catalog and on a separate library web page created for the collection. Gauss anticipates that cataloging will be completed by August 2012. Researchers are invited to contact Nancy Gauss (ngauss@western.edu), Director of Library Services, for further information.