C O M M U N I T Y
Professor and poet Wesley Trimpi dies at 85 By Nick Veronin Palo Alto Weekly
W
esley Trimpi, a poet and professor emeritus of English at Stanford University, died of pneumonia at Stanford University Hospital on March 6. He was 85, and a resident of Woodside. Mr. Trimpi is remembered fondly by his former colleagues and students as a dedicated academic who inspired others through his lectures, writings
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and poetry. Mr. Trimpi began and ended his academic career at Stanford. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English at the university in 1950 before heading to Harvard University for a doctorate in English. In 1957 he returned to Stanford, where he taught in the English department until his retirement in 1992. In the nearly 40 years he spent
at Stanford, he covered a wide variety of literary subjects — from 17th-century lyric poetry to ancient poetic theory — garnering accolades from fellow academics and helping to shape the minds of his students. His 1983 book, “Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and Its Continuity,” was praised by the late Harvard medieval scholar Morton Bloomfield as “a major contribution to our understanding of ancient narrative and its theory.”
One of Mr. Trimpi’s former students, Denis Logie, recalled taking a poetry class led by the professor in 1959. “It was a class I was ill-prepared for,” Mr. Logie stated in a university press release. “I loved poetry, but had received no formal insight or instruction in my high school. Professor Trimpi awakened in me an understanding and thirst and love for poetry, which has never abated.” Kathy Hannah Eden, an English and classics professor at Columbia University who studied under Mr. Trimpi as a graduate student, dedicated her first
book to him. She remembers him as a deeply inquisitive and intellectual man, with a passion for understanding the ancients. “The questions that preoccupied him in and out of the classroom proved fundamental to understanding the deep investment of the ancients, their admirers and even their detractors, throughout the centuries in what we call ‘literature’ today,” Ms. Eden said. “Wes was, without a doubt, the scholar’s scholar.” Steven Shankman, a professor of English and classics at the Continued on next page
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