The Third Kind of Knowledge: Selected Writings

by Robert Fitzgerald, Penelope Laurans Fitzgerald (Editor)

The memoirs and essays collected in  The Third Kind of Knowledge  encompass the many lives of a remarkable man. Poet, translator, critic, journalist, memoirist, scholar–the late Robert Fitzgerald (1910-1985) had an unusual range of gifts and lived a strikingly varied life in the literary and academic world. While growing up, his scholarly promise earned the attention of his mentor in classical studies, Dudley Fitts, and his poetic gifts the admiration first of Vachel Lindsay and later of T. S. Eliot (who took some of his college poems for publication in the  Criterion ). A reporter for the  New York Herald Tribune  in the thirties, Fitzgerald also spent time before and after the Second World War as a part of Henry Luce’s literary stable at  Time , where he forged his close friendship with James Agee and edited the Books Department for the magazine. His friendship with Agee, and also with Flannery O’Connor (whose literary executor he became) as well as with other literary figures such as John Berryman, Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon flourished during this period. In the early fifties he moved with his family to Italy, where he worked for six years on his celebrated translation of the Odyssey. His other classical translations– the Illiad ,  the Aeneid , and his translations of Euripides and Sophocles, several done in collaboration with Dudley Fitts–have become the the signal translations of our time. A renowned teacher as well as poet and scholar, Fitzgerald taught, over the years, at such institutions as Sarah Lawrence, Princeton, The New School, Mount Holyoke, and the University of Washington. His career culminated at Harvard where, in 1965, he was named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. For fifteen years his course in Versification influenced a generation of younger poets, and his seminar in “Homer, Virgil, and Dante” a generation of young scholars.  The Third Kind of Knowledge  displays the unusual breadth of Fitzgerald’s achievement and includes personal memoirs, reminiscences of literary friends, literary criticism of classical literature, and an interview on the art of translation. This volume has been prepared by his widow, Penelope Laurans Fitzgerald, following a plan begun by the author before his death.

279 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 1993

About the author

Until his death in 1985, Robert Stuart Fitzgerald was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Emeritus at Harvard University. He was a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 1984 he was named the poet of the Library of Congress. He published four volumes of his own poetry, and translations, with Dudley Fitts, of Alcestis, Antigone, and Oedipus Rex, in addition to his Illiad, Aeneid, and Oedipus at Colonus.

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Third Kind of Knowledge is a book of 16 essays by the acclaimed translator of Homer and Virgil Robert Fitzgerald. They were collected near the end of his life to be published after he was gone, the volume's publication to be overseen by his wife Penelope Laurans Fitzgerald. I was most interested in the opening section of 5 personal essays concerning his own coming of age and discovery of vocation. I'd begun reading the book to satisfy an itch for biographical material on him. The middle section contains 5 essays remembering James Agee, Flannery O'Connor, Randall Jarrell, Vachel Lindsay, and Ezra Pound, all close friends. Closing the volume are 6 critical essays on classical literature and its translation. These are studies of Iliad, Odyssey, the Aeneid, and The Divine Comedy. If you love Homer and Virgil you may find these closing pieces essential reads offering useful perspectives.

If you love Flannery O'Connor you'll enjoy his fond remembrance of her. For me this became the heart of the book. Of the friends remembered here she was probably closest to Fitzgerald and his family, having lived with them for a time while beginning her novel Wise Blood. No biographical material on her can avoid the terrible disease that ended her life so early, but Fitzgerald tells us about the talented young lady she was while living above his hilltop garage in Connecticut. It's that O'Connor, the one who played with his children, shared family meals and trips to chapel, and went for long walks down the drive to the mailbox, slender and tall in jeans and sweater, that I loved reading about. Here is one giant remembering another.

These are essays marked by affection. The critical essays aren't critical but are filled with love for the works he's studied his whole life. His personal memoirs are full of nostalgia and warm feelings for his beginnings when, his wife writes in her "Introduction," he found what "he was born to do...." They're matched by the equal affection he demonstrates in writing about his friends, lovely portraits by a man who couldn't admire them enough.

[Mills College Library]

811.52 F5545t 1993