An Interview with J. V. Cunningham

Abstract

The following interview took place during the afternoons of Septem ber 12th, 13th, and 14th of 1983 in the basement study of J. V. Cunning ham's home in Sudbury, Massachusetts. Though Cunningham had ex pressed doubts about being interviewed, he approached the occasion cor dially. At one point in earlier correspondence, he had suggested: "The ses sion?or sessions ? should be planned, but still should have an oral con text?like Homeric epic?to compare big things with little/' Following this suggestion, I sent in advance a roster of questions, and these provided the basis of discussion. Once the interview began, however, it ranged in dependently over many topics concerning Cunningham's writing and career. Anyone who meets Cunningham and who has read his poetry cannot help but be struck by the extraordinary ?one might say almost physiog nomic?resemblance between the man and his work. Lean and acute, Cunningham conveys an impression of great intelligence and scrupulosity. He is no more given to wasting words in conversation than to wasting them in poems, and when he says something one feels in the utterance a weight of care and reflection. At the same time, his speech and personality possess a quiet sympathy which makes him an engaging as well as an en lightening conversationalist. As the tapes wound from spool to spool on the low table between us, he spoke with precision yet without any indica tion of constraint. J. V. Cunningham was born in Cumberland, Maryland, on August 23, 1911. As he remarks in the interview, his family moved west when he was young, and he grew up mainly in Billings, Montana, and Denver. After his graduation from high school and a semester at St. Mary's College in Kansas, Cunningham worked in Denver and traveled for a while in the Southwest, doing freelance writing for the trade journals. Eventually, he entered Stanford University, where he received a B.A. in Classics and a Ph.D. in English. He subsequently taught at a variety of universities, in cluding Hawaii, Chicago, and Virginia. In 1953 he joined the English De partment at Brandeis, where he served until his retirement in 1980. As many readers know, he died on March 28, 1985, before this interview could be printed. 1 If twentieth-century literature has been distinguished by a number of notable poet /critics, Cunningham is arguably in a class by himself as a poet/scholar. In addition to publishing his remarkable poems, he has pro duced scholarship impressive equally for its range of interests and for its rigor of historical and philological analysis. He has written a landmark monograph on Shakespeare's tragedies, Woe or Wonder, an important study of Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson: Lyric and Legend, and seminal essays on, among other subjects, the Roman poet Statius, the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, and Wallace Stevens' verse. Yet it is as a poet that he is best known. At the age of twenty, he began publishing poems in magazines like Poetry and Commonweal, and now his poetic output, though comparatively compressed (his Collected Poems...

Enthalpies of Formation and Reaction for Primary Reactions of Methyl‐ and Methylmethoxysilanes from Density Functional Theory

“…This leads to the errors change by approximately 3.75 kcal/mol with the addition of each methyl group which is mostly due to the under‐prediction for the enthalpy of formation of CH 3 by 2.74 kcal/mol. It should also be noted that there is a large range of reported enthalpies of formation for the family of methylsilanes summarized by Doncaster et al26 they are given in kcal/mol as −4.0 to −11.8, −15.3 to −29.8, −28.0 to −44.5, and −42.2 to −58.7 for methylsilane, dimethylsilane, trimethylsilane and tetramethylsilane respectively 33–40. The corresponding values calculated in this study all fall toward the high end of the reported experimental ranges and they are −5.88, −18.15, −30.50, and −42.38 kcal/mol.…”

QCD vacuum structure

“…It can be described in terms of a Coulomb gas of fractionally charged objects, resembling the constituent monopoles described above. Also merons have come back on stage in [37] where regularised lattice merons and their fermionic zero modes have been obtained. Finally, ref.…”