WILLIAM K. ROSE
1924 - 1968
William K. Rose, Professor of English at Vassar College, was
born in San Francisco on April 17, 1924, and died in Poughkeep-
sie on October 4, 1968. When he came to Vassar as an instructor
in 1953, he had had a good deal of teaching experience at vari-
ous sorts of institutions; he had been a teaching assistant
and acting instructor at Stanford University (1944-46), an
instructor at Williams College (1948-50), and a lecturer at
the University of California in Berkeley (1950-51). Stanford
had awarded him the B.A. "With great distinction" in 1944, and
the M.A. in 1946. He had gone to Cornell University to study
first with David Daiches and then with Arthur Mizener, and there
was awarded the Ph.D. degree in 1952.
Throughout the whole of his adult life, Mr. Rose was an ener-
getic and creative teacher, scholar, writer, friend, and citizen.
His nature was complex: he was a man of ranging interests both
social and aesthetic; a man of deep sensibility; a man both
open and reserved; a man possessed of a tragic sense of life
and a richly comic way of seeing and talking about it. For all
the complexity, a unified being was there, and a unified achieve-
ment shines out of his short life.
He was what he was--and became what he became-—partly because
of his talent for giving himself to life and yet judging it
dispassionately and rigorously and always with the greatest
intelligence. His was the imagination that Wordsworth called
a "feeling intellect." He was fortunate in his nurture as an
American; one can see the beginnings of true sophistication and
of a taste that was never shallow or precious, in his enjoyment
of his youth in the west--notably in the town of his boyhood,
Healdsburg, California, "in the prune country" as he used to say,
where his forebears have lived for a hundred years. He knew
American cities and suburbs because his relatives lived in them,
as well as he knew the New York of writers and artists. Later,
as a man at home in London, he was never an expatriate.
Since this is a memorial minute for our faculty archives, it
is proper to stress his work at Vassar College, inseparable
though it was from the rest of his life. One of his oldest
friends remarked: "He chose Vassar, even as a young man," and
this is true. He was initially attracted, one may surmise, by
what the nearness of Vassar to New York's music, drama, and art
could do for him and his students, by the sophistication of our
faculty and our program, and by the honesty and effort demanded
WILLIAM K. ROSE (Continued)
of our students. He came to believe more and more strongly in
the value of Vassar as a particular liberal arts college for
its students and for American education.
Vassar's English department proved congenial to him; it taught
him much and he did much to deepen and define its philosophy
and to invent new teaching forms in which this philosophy could
be expressed. The department's insistence upon literary study
going beyond the narrow formalism in vogue in the 50's suited
him. He believed in the study of literature in depth, achieved
through maintaining a close connection between the forms of
literature and their human and social and historical contexts,
and through enabling students to see what it is to make a form
out of raw experience themselves.
He was a brilliant teacher of freshman courses, of narrative
writing and advanced composition, and (utilizing his research)
of advanced courses in literature. He taught a seminar for
many years in the novel of the twentieth century and at the time
of his death was preparing to teach an advanced course in modern
poetry. All his students felt in him a concern and respect for
them, which somehow helped them to develop self-knowledge and
self-respect. He perceived goodness and honesty, when these
were there, beneath youthful cynicism or pretentiousness, and
he helped young people to know themselves and say the things
that were true for them. He taught them--especially in the
writing courses-—to say quite directly what they saw in their
lives, to enlarge their views, to develop imagination, and to
use language for authentic comment. Thus, through the practice
of an art as he conceived it, young people learned something
about the nature and possibilities of the world, and were given
a chance to live a life both energetic and civilized. The discipline
was exacting: he had little patience with determined frivolity;
he had the "courage to insist upon the integrity deeper than the
easy skills of many students," as a colleague puts it; and he
wisely demanded more and more of students as they began to have
that integrity.
He was not interested in training all his students to be primar-
ily publishing critics, scholars, poets or novelists; the aim
was larger than that. But he did welcome and encourage the few
who showed signs of turning into real writers hereafter. His
bequest to the college, recently announced but included in his
will for several years, attests to his conviction that Vassar
should find and encourage young people who may prove to have
special power in the creative arts. It might be added here that
while such students were undergraduates, he wanted them to read
WILLIAM K. ROSE (Continued)
and study as another means to the discipline of literature; and
he wanted them to be sound scholars.
Mr. Rose had great energy, which he applied outside his single
department. He was from 1962 to 1966 chairman of the editorial
board of the Vassar Journal of yndergraduate_§tudies. Through-
out his years at Vassar he worked on several committees charged
with formulating policy for the whole college, the last being
the committee on the Comprehensive Plan, which we are at present
discussing. Here he exercised a characteristic freedom and
wisdom: he wanted to see new ways in which the students might
be liberated and civilized, new ways in which we might maintain
and build on Vassar's fundamental strengths. All this of course
had nothing to do with gimmicks or cliches, any more than did
his teaching. He knew what the strengths of Vassar were, imag-
ined what they might become, and hoped that whatever the college
did would be solid, sophisticated, and generally first rate. He
will be much missed as we carry out this plan.
Mr. Rose began early to write, and he wrote a great deal in the
course of his life, developing his considerable powers as a
scholar and critic. He is known for his essays and reviews
but especially for his admirable and much acclaimed edition of
the Letters of Wyndham Lewis, the painter and novelist (1963).
This past year, on a leave from Vassar College and with a
Guggenheim Fellowship, he had been at work on a book about Lewis
and his great contemporaries--Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence,
T. S. Eliot--the "men of 1914" who brought about a literary
revolution. It is to be hoped that other scholars may make use
of some of the materials that he had collected.
We conclude this memorial minute with a passage from a letter to
the London Times of October 16 written by his friend, the novelist
and critic Walter Allen: E
His English friends will have been shocked
by the news of Bill Rose's death. Letters
from Vassar speak of the courage with which
he met it....
For the past decade there was scarcely a year
in which Bill Rose was not in London for
several weeks, and often for several months.
I suspect he was as much at home in London as
in New York, and he was the friend of many
English poets and novelists. His personal
charm was great and his intelligence was
WILLIAM K. ROSE (Continued)
formidable: he was one of England's warmest
and most candid friends: and for many English-
men he stood for everything that was best and
most hopeful in American life. A very fine
scholar, he had made twentieth—century English
literature his special field, and his edition
of the letters of Wyndham Lewis is a model of
its kind. We took it for granted, alas, as the
precursor of comparable achievements to come.
His death is a loss both to his friends on both
sides of the Atlantic and to English studies;
though one knows that it will be felt most
deeply at Vassar, the college which he had
served so well and to which he was so ardently
devoted.
Respectfully submitted,
Garrett L. VanderVeer
Susan J. Turner
Caroline G. Mercer, Chairman