In Memory of Professor Jack Stillinger
A message from Professor Beth Lau:
Dear Colleagues:
It is with great sadness that I announce the death of Jack Stillinger, who passed away yesterday morning. His son Tom reports that he died peacefully and was comfortable and in good spirits to the end. As Auden says of Yeats, he has now “become his admirers,” who are legion. His many contributions to Keats and Romantic literature scholarship will continue to inform and influence students and scholars for probably as long as those subjects are studied.
I will mention that Greg Kucich, Dan Johnson, and I are co-editing a collection of essays in Jack’s honor. We are sorry he did not live to see it, but he knew we were working on it, and that news apparently gave him pleasure. The volume will include a commemoration of Jack’s illustrious career and bibliography of his major publications.
Jack was my dissertation director at Univ. of Illinois, and no one had a more profound influence on my work and sense of what it means to be a scholar.
Further tributes
Dr Heidi Thomson:
Jack Stillinger has been an inspiration for my whole adult life, from the moment I arrived in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in August 1984. Jack had a knack of sounding casual, even tentative when he explained something, which was very reassuring for a terrified Belgian Fulbright student. In the first ENGL 433 Keats seminar, on Thursday 23 August 1984, he drew a timeline of English poetry on the board and explained how ‘Keats became very good, very fast’. I can still hear him say that. He loved Keats. That seminar was the foundation for how I have been reading Keats’s poetry for the last 35+ years. I still cherish my sellotaped handout copies of Jack’s Keats Map and Keats Lexicon. Jack resisted a clear distinction between narrative and lyric poems; he wanted us to figure out what poems do, as opposed to what they mean. Jack’s straightforward, seemingly simple but incredibly elucidating, plot-driven approach to reading has been my main teaching inspiration in my own career. His pedagogy, understated as it was, was sheer genius. Jack never imposed one particular or singular interpretation on anything. As he puts it in his Preface to Reading The Eve of St. Agnes: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction (1999), his subject is ‘Keatsian inexhaustibility’. The one thing he insisted on, amidst all the multiples, was precision and respect for the texts. He didn’t so much teach matter as method, but he invoked some of the best poetry to do so.
Jack was a generous and kind supervisor, unstinting in his support. He never tried to direct me into any particular interpretation, but he insisted on concision and clarity. He was a meticulous editor, shaming me into producing correct copy by example, patiently editing and annotating my drafts. No detail escaped him. His incredibly hard work seemed effortless. His advice was sensible and practical: ‘you don’t finish a dissertation,’ he told me, ‘you stop. And that’s ok.’ I can still see his smile when he said ‘that’s ok.’ I’ve been repeating that to my students for decades now.
Jack was never fazed by the fact that English was my third language, or if he was, he never showed it. His confidence in me was the springboard for my career in English literature as a non-English background speaker. While my original plan had been to do an MA and return to Belgium he encouraged me to do a PhD. Our relationship was always, entirely, professional and, while relaxed, formal. We had lunch together once when I was still his student. Shortly before I left for New Zealand Jack treated me to lunch at Katsinas in Champaign. Afterwards he drove me back to the English department and he gave me a big hug. We both cried. When I left for New Zealand in 1990 he gave me a copy of Eric McCormick’s book, The Friend of Keats: A Life of Charles Armitage Brown which had just come out in 1989, and inscribed it ‘To Heidi, the emigrant’. Brown had emigrated to New Zealand in 1841. We kept in touch over the years, he sent me copies of his books, and there were a few visits. I last visited Jack at his home in August 2016. Rest in peace, Jack, your legacy lives.
Dr Richard Wheeler:
Jack Stillinger was born in Chicago, February 16, 1931, to Clifford and Ruth Stillinger, but grew up mostly in Houston, Texas. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas in 1953, and he earned a Master of Arts degree from Northwestern, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, in 1954. After he received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1958, Jack joined the English Department at Illinois as an assistant professor; six years later he was made full professor at the age of thirty-three. In 1970 he was appointed as a permanent member of the Center for Advanced Study, the highest academic honor awarded by the University of Illinois.
By the time he retired Jack had held fellowships and awards from, among others, the Woodrow Wilson and Guggenheim foundations, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Jack was the 1986 recipient of the Keats-Shelley Association’s Distinguished Scholar Award. In 1993 he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious society honoring academic excellence.
Equally at home as a scholar, critic, and textual editor, Jack published 28 books, numerous articles and reviews mainly on nineteenth-century English literature. In the 1980s he launched a large theoretical and historical project on the nature of authorship to consider such basic questions as how and why writers write; how they develop; and how they interact with editors, publishers, and other collaborators. Results of this project are the books: Reading “The Eve of St. Agnes”: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction (1999); Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (1994); and Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (1991). His most recent work is Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth (2006).
His earlier scholarship includes editions of J.S. Mill and William Wordsworth and a series of critical studies, collected in The Hoodwinking of Madeline (1971), emphasizing the realistic, skeptical, essentially antiromantic tendencies of English Romantic poetry. He has also explored the textual and publishing history of John Keats, producing first The Texts of Keats’s Poems (1974) and then the definitive Harvard edition The Poems of John Keats (1978) and several volumes devoted to Keats’s manuscripts. Jack’s work on Keats’s manuscripts contributed extensively to a transformation of the discipline of textual criticism. For years he edited literature from the Romantic Period for the Norton Anthology of English Literature. In 2008, he published a collection of his poems, Nina and the Balloon.
With grateful thanks to the contributors for the permission to share these messages on the K-SAA website.
