On the Ides of Ted: A Tribute to Professor Tayler [by David Lehman]

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March 05, 2019

On the Ides of Ted: A Tribute to Professor Tayler [by David Lehman]

A memorial tribute for the late Edward Tayler, Columbia's great Renaissance man (and my mentor), on March 15, 2019, a Friday, at 3 PM in the rotunda of Low Memorial Library on the Columbia campus.

Ted taught Shakespeare, Milton, Elizabethan and seventeenth-century poetry and changed minds, if not lives, in his brilliant seminars and lectures.

He was quite a fellow, compact (5'4), agile (a varsity wrestler as an undergraduate at Amherst), witty and quick on his feet, and he believed that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide everything in two and those that don't.

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"Lively and affectionate" Publishers Weekly

Radio

I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark

from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman