A Word in Your Ear

Monroe Spears, until his recent death at the age of 81, was Moody Professor of English Emeritus at Rice University. Among the several other positions he held in his academic career, he was from 1952 to 1964 concurrently professor of English at the University of the South and editor of the Sewanee Review. He was the author of several works of criticism, including The Poetry of W. H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island (Oxford University Press, 1963); Dionysus and the City: Modernism in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1971); and American Ambitions: Selected Essays (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).