Edward Weismiller

He lived in Washington, D.C. until his death on August 25, 2010, at 95.

Professor Weismiller, an eminent scholar of John Milton’s poetry, came to Washington, DC in 1968 to study original source materials in the Folger Library, and stayed on to teach in the English department of the George Washington University. After his retirement in 1980 he remained there, reveling in the city’s beauty, variety, and cultural ferment. He was in love with words and stories and had a gift for making and keeping friends. An inspiring teacher, he worked to instill the love of beautiful and precise language in his students, and many of them went on to success as writers, artists, actors, teachers.

In 1968, now divorced, he came to Washington and began a new phase of life. His third book of poems, The Branch of Fire, was published in 1970, and he was invited to give a reading of his poems at the Library of Congress in 1979. After retiring in 1980 he continued to write and reap honors. He contributed to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry, was an editor of the Variorum Milton series (a compendium of the best modern scholarship), and received the 2001 Robert Fitzgerald Award for lifetime contribution to the study of metrics and versification. In 2002, at age 87, he became the oldest Yale Younger Poet when the press published Walking Toward the Sun, with a foreword by W. S. Merwin (then U.S. poet laureate).

Weismiller always saw himself as a citizen soldier, not professional military, but his service affected him deeply. The war’s ambience and human lessons permeated his 1962 novel, The Serpent Sleeping, recently republished in a British series of classic spy novels. FOIA requests by historian Tim Naftali got his final OSS report declassified, setting off a much-enjoyed series of interviews with historians and popular writers on what his war was really like. Weismiller had been one of the few Marines stationed in Europe; most were in the South Pacific. His unusual situation eventually yielded a bonus: a White House invitation to attend the 50th anniversary celebrations of V.E. Day, traveling to England, France, Prague, and all the way to Russia in a special tour with distinguished veterans from all the services, then-Vice President Gore, and then-Secretary of the Army Togo West.

After the war Weismiller declined an invitation to join the newly formed CIA, which succeeded the OSS; instead he went home to his family in Southern California and commenced work on his novel, The Serpent Sleeping, sustained by a Guggenheim writing fellowship. In 1948 the Rhodes Trust invited back the scholars whose time had been cut short by the war, allowing them to bring their new families, so he earned his doctorate from Oxford. He went on to teach poetry, creative writing, and Milton at Pomona College. Over the years four more children were born.

In 1941, Random House hired Weismiller, then a 26-year-old student, to translate the first award-winning novel of Franco-Khmer poet Makhali-Phal into English. La Favorite de dix ans was published in New York in 1942 as The Young Concubine. In 2008, Professor Weismiller began advising a literary team working to produce an updated version of his original translation incorporating cultural background material unavailable in 1941.

He graduated from Cornell College in 1938, from Harvard University with a master’s in 1942, and from Oxford University, with a D.Phil. in 1950, where he was a Rhodes scholar.

He was raised in Wisconsin and Vermont. In 1936, the twenty-year-old Edward Weismiller became the youngest poet to win the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize.

In 1936 he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, soon interrupted when England and Germany declared war. Repatriated with the other U.S. students, he earned his master's degree and taught at Harvard, where he founded lifelong friendships with some of the best poets and writers of his generation. A sojourn at Yaddo nourished his talent. He also met and married Frances Merewether Power of Redlands, California, a budding poet and journalist; their first child was born in 1942. He translated a prize-winning French novel, The Young Concubine, and began his second book of poems, The Faultless Shore, published after the war, in 1946.

Edward Ronald Weismiller (August 3, 1915 Monticello, Wisconsin - August 25, 2010 Washington, D.C.) was an American poet, scholar and professor of English, George Washington University. .