![]() ![]() of classmates who’d prepped at institutions more exacting than my public high school in Oklahoma. Alfred Prufrock,” my freshman English-essay bullshit had begun to approximate the B.S. By spring, though I barely knew what to make of “The Love Song of J. That fall and winter, Long forbearingly shepherded me through rewrites of the papers he assigned, and incrementally I started to get the hang of it. ![]() A month into the term, the professor, Charles Long, gently but firmly explained that he didn’t expect me to offer novel insights into “The Faerie Queen” or “Paradise Lost.” More urgent, he wanted me to recognize that I had no clue how to write an essay. I’d been placed in a mid-level, rather than entry-level, English poetry course by virtue of a misleadingly respectable score on the SAT verbal, the result of compulsive memorization of vocabulary and word-analogy lists in a Barron’ s test-preparation workbook. The first occurred in the fall of my freshman year at Yale, in 1968. Our revelatory encounters with teachers who will make a difference in our lives stay with us as vividly, I think, as our recollections of falling in love. Our first imperative was to eliminate “clutter,” which Bill regarded as “the disease of American writing.” Photograph by Walter Daran/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ![]()
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