Background
Helen Bevington was born on April 2, 1906. Bevington was raised in Worcester, New York, where her father was a Methodist minister. Helen's younger brother, Boyce Smith (Reverend Ray Vaughn), was also a Methodist minister.
5801 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Bevington attended the University of Chicago and earned a degree in philosophy.
116th St & Broadway, New York, NY 10027, USA
Bevington proceeded to write a thesis about Thoreau, earning a master’s degree from Columbia University. It was in 1928.
1 Park Pl, Elmira, NY 14901, USA
Helen attended Elmira College in upstate New York before transferring to the University of Chicago in 1924.
(The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefl...)
The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.
https://www.amazon.com/Found-Verse-Manuscript-Letter-Author/dp/B00SG0QCBM/?tag=2022091-20
1961
(This is a book of journeys, to places - Russia, Hawaii, I...)
This is a book of journeys, to places - Russia, Hawaii, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, the South Seas, the Rhine, Australia, New Zealand, New Mexico - and to the classroom at Duke University where she was Professor of English until her retirement in 1976. Since everything is a journey, the book is concerned with a travel of all kinds, in books, in memories, in people living and dead, a lighthearted search for Eden on this planet but a more serious search for survival in the troubled decade of the 1970s.
https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Everything-Journal-Seventies-ebook/dp/B00HG1LBIG/?tag=2022091-20
1983
(“Each time I leave home I seem to go in search of somethi...)
“Each time I leave home I seem to go in search of something - call it a bo tree, or Shangri-La, or paradise - which is only another name for peace itself and these days decidedly a fool’s errand.” So writes Helen Bevington in The World and the Bo Tree, a book that describes her travels taken amid the turbulence of the 1980s. The “world” of the title is the one everybody knows, a fairly troubled, even threatening place to inhabit these days.
https://www.amazon.com/World-Bo-Tree-Helen-Bevington-ebook/dp/B00HG1LBUO/?tag=2022091-20
2012
(In this autobiographical volume, the remarkable Helen Bev...)
In this autobiographical volume, the remarkable Helen Bevington looks for answers to the question of how to live or, more specifically, how to confront growing older. A familiar face on the literary landscape since the mid-1940s, Bevington contemplates the course of her own life in view of the suicide of her father, the final years her mother spent in unwilling solitude, and the tragic suicide of her son following a crippling automobile accident from which he could never recover.
https://www.amazon.com/Third-Only-Way-Reflections-Staying-ebook/dp/B00HRRYR94/?tag=2022091-20
2012
Helen Bevington was born on April 2, 1906. Bevington was raised in Worcester, New York, where her father was a Methodist minister. Helen's younger brother, Boyce Smith (Reverend Ray Vaughn), was also a Methodist minister.
Helen attended Elmira College in upstate New York before transferring to the University of Chicago in 1924. Then Bevington attended the University of Chicago and earned a degree in philosophy. She proceeded to write a thesis about Thoreau, earning a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1928.
Helen taught at Bedford Academy in New York and was chairman of the English Institute of Adult Education in New York City before moving to Durham. At Duke, she taught creative writing, literary criticism, and English literature. She was awarded a full professorship in 1970. While she retired from Duke in 1976, she continued to write and publish, with her last book coming out in 1996.
Besides teaching and writing, Bevington had a "secondary career" as a lecturer and reader of poetry. She received numerous awards and recognition, including the North Carolina Award in Literature in 1973, two awards for producing the best volume of poetry by a resident of the state and the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association's highest award. In a 1993 interview, she showed her dry wit in an explanation of her publishing credits, saying it was a pity to publish a book "because that meant one must start another." Her most noted book, Charley Smith's Girl, was banned by the library in the small town of Worcester, New York, where she grew up, because the book tells of her minister father's having been divorced by her mother for affairs that he was carrying on with younger female parishioners. This censure was a distinction she enjoyed.
(This is a book of journeys, to places - Russia, Hawaii, I...)
1983(“Each time I leave home I seem to go in search of somethi...)
2012(In this autobiographical volume, the remarkable Helen Bev...)
2012(The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefl...)
1961Helen was very clear love of her subject, her belief in the importance of what Helen was teaching, that poetry was the prime means by which the English language took to purify and communicate itself most eloquently.
It eased the "impossibly difficult, endlessly difficult" task of living alone to write, which Helen usually did from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. "When I'm writing, the hours pass," Helen said in 1979. "I write every day for as long as I can - I can rewrite for hours."
Quotes from others about the person
"She was one of the great teachers. Her course in 20th century poetry was one of the most distinguished ... the English department offered. It was a tremendously influential course in my own development." - Reynolds Price, colleague and friend
Helen met her husband Merle M. Bevington in a class in romanticism in 1927. They married, saved up $1,500 to travel and roamed the globe until they returned to New York to face the stock market crash in 1929. Helen and Merle had two sons: the eldest David Bevington is among the preeminent Shakespeare scholars in the world. The second son was named Phillip R. Bevington. Helen is survived by her son, David Bevington, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, and daughter-in-law, Peggy Bevington, and five grandchildren. Her second son, Philip Bevington, died in the 1980s.