September. But, alas, the 25.00 would not cover all the fees. I would be responsible for 51.30 more. Defeated by the enormity of the sum, I turned the letter over to Dad, who began to fatten a calf and worry the pig. My two years at Weber High had been remarkable for finding myself in plays I hadnt tried out for, in taking speech and debate classes that were new and easy, and having attached myself to the high and low political cunning of Rex McEntire in waking one day in May to find myself president-elect of the student body. I owe much in my life to Rex and to my sister Ruth who was always the queen of something or an elected office holder. A year ahead of me, Rex and Ruth churned up a wake in which I roiled and splashed into places I would never have ventured on my own. I followed Rex as student body president at both Webers. He never had to stay around to watch what I did. I did not do much. But going to Weber Junior College was the luckiest break of my life. For one thing, I met a couple of teachers there. Two Teachers Maybe Three Leland Leland Monsons lectures were recitations and readings. In that emphatic voice that gave even his informal comments the tone of doctrine proclaimed, he read us poetry. After the first shock as I tried not to laugh at him, I was hooked on poetry for life. He astonished me at the power the words expressed, at the meanings (moral ones only) he found, at his unremitting seriousness. We parodied him, for he was ripe material for parody. Harvey Wheelwright was best at this. Even I have gained a few paces on the other guests at dinner parties when the level of wit has receded to my level trying to get the singular way he sounded when, rising upon his toes, then rocking back on his heels, he would address Care-Charmer Sleep and through medleyed apostrophes reveal to The Old Soother that a nap is a good thing, especially while one is napping. And, enlarged by the war and its rhetoric, when he reached Tennysons vatic trochees, gulping caesuras, and hysterical pleonasms in Locksley Hall: Till the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags are furled In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. his whole body shook, his voice trembled, and par-LIA-ment and fed-ERA-tion quavered through the east end of Moench and out into the enslaved masses huddled on Jefferson. Transfixed, we were braced for earnest endeavor. One day I was in the English office waiting to see him. On Ray Wests desk Mr. West was the modernist in a department centered somewhere to the rear of Hugh Walpole was a small book. I was examining the title, A Garland For John Donne, a wreath of essays woven by Theodore Spencer. I had never heard of Donne. I will never pay homage to him. I turned directly into Mr. Monsons face. A man of God and a WR-i-TER of lasc-IV-I-ous verse! I put the book down, did whatever business I had with Mr. Monson, leaped across the hall to the circulation desk and the stacks of the library, and checked out the two volume Grierson. Calves and pigs had died that I might learn. I was hot for learning. I could find nothing worthy of bad report. A few years later Donnes sexual wit was available to me. In the poems I tried to read that day, Donne appeared to do very well by his religious vocation, although I pondered for a long time the similarity of a battering three-personed God, and the hat in the snow beside George Washington as he kneels in prayer at Valley Forge. I had seen that in a painting. I was disappointed in Donne. Another school, another teacher, and a few years beyond Weber were necessary to make me ready for his tough delightsI should have been disappointed in Mr. Monson. But he stands high in my private faculty of beloved teachers. Like many impressive teachers, he taught a lot one later has to discard or severely modify. Morality ruled him and the literature he instructed us in. He had no true interest in the technicalities of verse. A metrical pattern was a metrical pattern, and he rode roughshod over the dramatic sense if it rebelled against the beat of the poem. Perhaps that is why he was a good reader of hortatory verses, not so good on dramatic pieces. If you wanted to know what strategies determined the sonorities he read from Shakespeare, Daniel, Sidney, and the beloved Romantics and Victorians, Mr. West might help you, but not Mr. Monson. Mr. Monson would veer at the speed of a turning page around the las-CIV-I-ous repartee between Hamlet and Ophelia and sail before the wind toward the great speeches that so moved him and us. We sailed with him. But from Mr. West I first heard of inverted feet and the tension in a line between metrical expectations and prose sense. And of images. I dont know how I heard of these thingsfrom Mr. West, for the only course I took from him was freshman composition. Perhaps he bootlegged onto those drifting sands an occasional green sprout to keep himself sane. One day Mr. West drew on the board a girl on her hands and knees, throwing her hair over her head to dry to show us what Frost was getting at in a few lines of Birches. Never before had anyone isolated a figure of speech and asked me to attend to it. Attend! Later, at Kenyon College, I learned to attend to the particulars of a poem: in ten pages a week for fifteen weeks I attended. In Mr. Monsons classes we did not attend. We swooned as we dodged the liquid siftings of doves in immemorial elms and our ears and eyes took joy at the moaning of insects on summer eves as gathering swallows twittered in the sky. In Mr. Wests class (it had to be Dry Rock II but how could it have been?) we attended to those las-CIV-I-ous spondees brushing against gentle pyrrhics; and I saw La Von Earl on her hands and knees, her hair long and silken tossed forward to dry in the sun beside the cottonwoods at Four Mile, as brown carp lolled in the brackish waters like drunken Nereids and magpies cawed in the sun. To get images like that you have to attend to the text. You cant be off gathering wool from lambs bleating on the hilly bourne. At Kenyon Mr. Ransom taught me that one must attend, and that if one attended one would know that Shelly was clinically insane. Mr. Monson taught me to listen to sounds, even those piped through a splintered pipe. I had never listened until Mr. Monson spoke. Early in my first term at Weber, I saw Mr. West and Maurice Richards (sophomore class president, and the visible half of the