In Harmony with Drydens Fables |
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June 28, 2001--University of Wyoming English professor Cedric Reverand has been recognized as one of the world's foremost experts on English poet, dramatist, and critic John Dryden.
Reverand, who specializes in 17th and 18th century English literature, is one of 16 Dryden scholars – of whom only four are Americans – selected to contribute to John Dryden, Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). He also was selected to present papers at conferences in Bristol, England and the University of California-Los Angeles that commemorated the 300th anniversary of Dryden's death.
Reverand began studying Dryden's work several years ago. He says that gradually he became fascinated by the last major work of the writer's career, Fables, Ancient and Modern, a collection of 21 tales long admired by Dryden readers. Some scholars have ranked the work second only to John Milton's Paradise Lost as the greatest narrative poem of the 17th century.
"Despite all this, nobody had ever written a book on Fables," Reverand says. "There are various reasons why. First, it's not only complex, but also long, longer than Homer's Odyssey, longer than the Iliad, more than twice as long as Paradise Lost. Second, scholars had generally skipped Fables because they assumed translations were mechanical exercises: I treated them as creative works."
Reverand's resulting book, Dryden's Final Poetic Mode: The Fables, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1988. The work encouraged others to study and teach Fables, Reverand says, and to write both about Dryden's late poetry and about his translations.
"In the past, Dryden's satirical poems from the 1680s got all the attention," he says. "Now, Fables is regarded as a major work in the Dryden canon."
Reverand , who has taught at UW since 1971, earned a B.A. degree from Yale, an M.A. degree from Columbia, and a doctorate degree from Cornell. In addition to his book on Dryden's Fables, he has published more than 30 separate articles and essays, and hundreds of reviews. His honors include appointment as an Honorary Fellow and Life Member of Clare Hall (Cambridge University) and an Ellbogen Award for Meritorious Classroom Teaching at UW.
"People often assume that scholars don't make good teachers and good teachers don't make good scholars," he says. "In fact, if you listed the faculty in my department who had the most impressive publications and then the faculty who had the teaching awards, you would find the names were, by and large, the same on each list."
Reverand's other interests include art and music. He has played piano since he was five years old and is an accomplished harpsichord player. Reverand regularly teaches an undergraduate course in literature and the fine arts, and he has served as UW's director of Cultural Programs – responsible for booking and running the university's concert series – for more than 20 years. He recently received the Betty Connors Award for outstanding service to the performing arts. The award is granted by the Western Arts Alliance, the largest American organization of performing arts professionals in the United States. Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2001
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