WALTER sworm
1917 -1959
Walter Stone, Associate Professor of English at
Vassar College, died in London on March ll, 1959.
in his forty-second year. Upon this occasion we are
paying tribute to a gifted teacher, scholar, and
writer, whom we shall long remember and whose death
we shall long mourn.
Walter Stone was born in St. Cloud, Minnesota, on
August 4, 1917. He was educated at the University of
Illinois, taking the degree of B. A. with highest
tutorial honors in 1939, and going on to the M. A.
at the same university in l9hl. After working for
a time for the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation,
he went into the United States Navy and served from
l942 to 1945, including a tour of duty in the Aleutian
Islands. In 1944, he married Ruth Perkins, who was
later to receive considerable recognition for her
poetry.
When the war ended, he entered the Graduate School of
Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Remaining
in residence at Harvard until 1950, he took a
master's degree in l949 and his Ph.D. in 1953. His
doctoral thesis, which he wrote chiefly under the
direction of the late Professor Hyder Rollins, was a
study of the literature of Elizabethan eschatology,
in particular a cluster of predictions pointing to the
end of the world in the 1580's. This thesis opened
the way to the larger study of Renaissance apocalyptic
and eschatological thinking on which he was doing
research in England at the time of his death. He had
hoped to write the first book on the subject. His
researches had already led to the publication, in the
Journal of English and Germanic Philology, for 1953,
of "Shakespeare and the Sad Augurs", an article which
proves that a recent well-known attempt to date
Shakespeare's sonnets has been based on radical mis-
interpretation of available evidence. By its extensive
learning and its sound arguments, the article quite
transcends its limited subject and stands as an
important contribution to the study of eschatology in
the Renaissance.
WALTER STONE (Continued)
It was at Harvard that he began his career as a
teacher, serving as a Teaching Fellow, on the staff
of "English A", from l946 to 1950. In 1950 he
returned to the University of Illinois as an
Instructor in English. In 1953 he came to Vassar
College as an Assistant Professor of English, and
in 1953 he was promoted to Associate Professor.
Among the courses which he taught here were senior
composition and poetry from Blake to Keats. In 1958
he also received a Faculty Fellowship. It is impos-
sible to exaggerate how much this award meant to him,
for it enabled him to go to England, which up until
that time he had known only through the literature
which he loved so well.
So far this has been an account of Walter Stone's life
as a scholar and teacher. He was also a writer. For
years he wrote poetry and fiction, and at the time of
his death his talent was beginning to win recognition.
One sign of this recognition will be the inclusion of
some of his poems in Poets of Today VI, to be published
this year by Scribner's. In 1958 one of his short
stories, "Reason Not the Need", appeared in the New
Yorker, and an article, "The Mezzanine", in the Partisan
Review. "The Mezzanine" is a witty satire on the annual
meetings of the Modern Language Association. But Walter
Stone, like other people endowed with a strong sense of
irony, could be satirical about things of which he was
very fond, and he spent some of his happiest hours at
such meetings, for they gave him an opportunity to meet
so many of his old friends.
Among his gifts, his talent for friendship is one of the
more notable. People of all kinds were easily drawn toward
him, and, after they had come to know him, felt that
here was someone with a special quality, here was someone
unique. It is not easy to define this quality. Some
things about him are very clear. He was gentle and
warm-hearted and generous, quick to sympathize, and
completely open in his manner. He was one of the most
pleasant of companions, lively, witty, full of intellec-
tual curiosity, full of interesting ideas -- and always
kind.
But there is something else that is harder to describe
and perhaps even more central to his nature. There is a
tradition that St. Francis once found a piece of paper
IILEER STOKE (continued)
on a muddy reed and picked it up and cleaned it off
ct or reverence for the "nod" that was written on
it. Not many people, in this day or that, can
either feel or understand such a reverence for words,
but Walter Stone did. Words were not merely the
instruments of his trade as a teacher of literature
and writer: they illumined the world and lighted up
human experience which without them would be brutiah
and opaque, and it was Walter Stone's sense of this
numinous quality of the word that inspired his deep
love for, and absolute dedication to, literature»
Even more remarkable was the un-derivative and, in
the best sense of the word, naive character of this
devotion. He was a learned man, and his mind was
thoroughly steeped in the literary and scholarly
traditions of England and Western Europe, but
literature for him was never just a learned enthusi-
asm or sophisticated hobby. It was his primary
response to life. It was the deepest expression,
perhaps, of that extraordinary vitality that moved
out from him in so many directions and took so many
forms, in all of which one sensed a deep love of the
world as well as an acute sensitivity to the pain
and mystery and beauty with which it is filled. Walter
Stone was in fact, that very rare thing, a natively
American literary mind as naturally and unselfconsciously
at home in the atmosphere of the imagination as the
fabulists and poets of the older literary cultures,
yet happily free from any tinge or a compulsive or
restricting ”nativism“. His true and great vocation
was that of the poet, and he served it well.
The record of this vocation remains not only in his
writings hut in the minds of many of the students
for who his teaching opened doors upon literature
and the world; The following words were written by
one of his former students shortly after Walter Stone
died, and it is fitting that they should be recorded

Mr. Stone conveyed his own feeling for life,
and literature as an expression of the greet-
ness of life to all his students. He left us
with a wonderful, magical sense of the
immediacy of people and places. Through the
WALTER STONE (Continued)
works of other poets and writers, he gave
us a very special world. To those of us who
had him for our central courses, he held
out a kind of poetic vision and offered us
a part.
Dean Mace
Frederick Olafson
Lynn Bartlett
XV - 153-155