Victorian Poetry

Victorian Poetry 41.2 (2003) 291-292

Professor Jerome Hamilton Buckley

John D. Rosenberg
Columbia University

A youthful, endearingly gangly Professor Jerome Buckley presided over a graduate seminar I took at Columbia in the mid fifties. Like scores of his other students, I attribute the subsequent direction of my career as a Victorianist to Jerry's mentoring. He had arrived on campus in 1952, the year after the publication of his magisterial The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture. It is remarkable that the Victorians who most engage us today are those that Jerry rehabilitated more than half a century ago, when to the modernist mind virtually all of the literature of the later nineteenth century seemed weary, stale, flat, and hypocritical. Within the lively pages of The Victorian Temper, men, women, movements of mind, successive decades, detach themselves from the blur of the past and take on a sharply-etched individuality. "Almost every Victorian thesis," Jerry points out, "produced its own antithesis." In his portrait of a culture, the term "Victorian" sheds its pejorative, often contradictory associations and the reader becomes immersed in a literature of astonishing variety and vitality.

All of us in that graduate seminar fifty years ago recognized the privilege of being in the presence of a humane and generous teacher who was a master of what he taught. I count it as one of the blessings of my intellectual life that he was the first reader, chapter by chapter, of my dissertation on John Ruskin, of whose "deep if chaotic coherence" he writes brilliantly in The Victorian Temper.

The Victorian Temper was followed in 1960 by the second of his major studies, Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet. Again Jerry was a pioneer, writing when Tennyson's reputation was at a low ebb and persuasively establishing the importance of the Laureate's two great Arthur poems, his elegy to Arthur the friend in In Memoriam and to Arthur the King in the Idylls.

I have for decades drawn shamelessly on two other of Jerry's books—The Triumph of Time (1966), a study of the Victorians' quite unprecedented sense of time's passage, and The Turning Key (1984), on autobiography since 1800. The lucidity of Jerry's approach to literature is evident in his energetic refusal to let "theory of autobiography" efface the actual lives and particular words of his autobiographers.

But in praising Professor Buckley's work I do not want to lose sight of the man, in all his endearing eccentricity and humanity. Let one occasion stand for many: a remarkable gathering in downtown Manhattan on the night of March 25, 1989. Generations of former students gathered in joyous celebration of the works and spirit of Jerome Hamilton Buckley. I recall a large banquet hall where Jerry and Elizabeth, ever side by side, graciously accepted the tributes of those whose lives had forever been touched [End Page 290] and altered for the better by their mentor. In a world where ignorant armies still clash by night, Jerry's decency and luminous intelligence will remain a beacon for us all.