Benjamin DeMott, educator

We learned to read with him. He taught us to respect our gut instincts in reading a line of poetry, a passage from a story. We learned to let ourselves open up and see, and trust what we noticed as sufficient and to the point.

He taught with authority, and he taught us to read with authority, to have faith in the opinions our minds would work out for us upon studying an issue, an event, a behavior, a person's speech. We became enabled as critics.

A delivery truck goes by. You feel the overkill, the churning waste of energy to accelerate at every intersection, to wheeze uselessly with pollution at the next. You feel the cost on the planet. It's the same moment of recognition from real life as we had as readers when we read Hardy's "The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House." Seeing the deer on tip toe, ready to spring away. Once seeing it, you don't deny it, even if such a claim of understanding were the same thing that made you stand out as a crazy in the wold of people.

Emily Dickinson's "I Heard a Fly Buzz as I Died," was something he read for us, gingerly, respecting a greater authority on eternity than his own readership. On that one, he stopped, self-consciously, a little bit short, as if to silently point to a whole world of far understandings.

He noticed the essential, about Presidents and 9/11 reports, about the cultural attitudes rife in television shows, just as he would a poem of Keats, the attitude of Lear.