When I was appointed to the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters at New York University, I asked the chairman of the department, the late James W. Tuttleton, if I might be treated as a generalist—one who might be allowed to teach any courses in the Department that he regarded himself as competent to teach, without having to confine himself to a particular “area” or “field.” Professor Tuttleton had no problem with that request. Years later, when NYU elevated me to a University Professorship, the then-president, L. Jay Oliva, told me to discuss my teaching duties with the Chair. I saw no reason to do that; I was quite content with my conditions, specifically with my unquestioned movement among the literatures of England, Ireland, and the United States.

Over the years at NYU, I have taught lecture courses in the history of English poetry from Beowulf to Paradise Lost, Shakespeare—the sonnets and about ten plays—the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, and “Yeats and Modern Irish Poetry.” (When I taught this Yeats-and-after course, I included Austin Clarke, Louis MacNeice—not the expected Patrick Kavanagh, whose poems I don’t warm to—Beckett, Kinsella, Longley, Heaney, Muldoon, and Mahon: I should have included Montague and MacGreevy, too.) I have also taught graduate seminars in Jane Austen, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce. I recall with some affection one graduate seminar I taught in “The Language of Literary Criticism,” in which for each class I chose one word, offered a list of