All Scholars

William Ellery Leonard was chiefly a poet and professor of English, a friend of Sinclair Lewis, Carl Sandburg, and Sherwood Anderson. He made an important contribution to the teaching of Lucretius by the school text of that poet which he edited with Stanley B. Smith. At the age of two, Leonard was terrified by a locomotive that produced a phobia of trains, while his being set upon by a group of schoolyard bullies at age nine led (according to Leonard's autobiography, The Locomotive-God) to a lifelong neurosis, reclusiveness that became agoraphobia, and failed marriages. Practically self-educated, he attended Boston University in nearly abject poverty and studied at Harvard under George Lyman Kittredge and William James. Though he studied in Germany when American universities were most Germanophile, he was not a scientific scholar, but rather the reflection of a German Romantic poet in dress, manners, and spirit. In grief over the suicide of his first wife in 1911, Leonard sought distraction in translation and completed his rendering of Lucretius in 1912. His most notable poem, Two Lives, an examination of his first marriage, was called by Howard Mumford Jones "the best poem that has ever come out of America" (Yearsley). He then went on to translate Beowulf, compose his poems in the forms and language of an earlier age, and teach his classes, particularly freshman English. Leslie Fiedler said, "in the classroom he was everything he was out if it—translator, critic, scholar, poet, autobiographer, raconteur, philosopher, theologian, wit—plus something else: a model for the young of the way in which the stuff confided by authors long dead . . . can again become living flesh." His edition of Lucretius was the product of nearly a lifetime's interest, which took 15 years to complete. The commentary is long on information, short on exposition. The job of work was divided: Smith handled matters of philology and style, Leonard wrote an introduction placing Lucretius' poem in historical context. The introduction describes Lucretius' "scorn, his pity, his nobility of spirit, his intelligence, his capacity for long, difficult toil, his zest for combat with the weapons of song." Leonard's view of Lucretius' sources is limited essentially to Epicurus and Empedocles (missing out tragedy, satire, Hellenistic philosophers), but the introduction is still one of the best essays on Lucretius, and the edition was at the time of its publication the best edition available. It remains widely used in colleges and universities.