Henry Augustin Beers was an American literary historian, poet, and professor at Yale University.
Background
Henry Beers was born on January 2, 1847, in Buffalo, New York, where his parents, Connecticut people, were spending the winter on a visit. On his paternal side he was descended from James Beers, who came from England in 1634 and settled in Fairfield, Connecticut, in 1659. His grandfather, Seth Preston Beers, was the leading lawyer of Litchfield County, and a prominent member of the Connecticut legislature. His father, George Webster Beers, lived in Litchfield. There Beers gained his intimate knowledge of New England nature and in his grandfather's library his intimate knowledge of New England literature. His mother was Elizabeth Victoria Clerc. On the maternal side his inheritance was entertainingly different. Both grandparents were deaf-mutes. His grandfather, Laurent Clerc, had been one of the favorite pupils of the Abbé Sicard in the national institution for deaf-mute instruction at Paris, and had come to this country to assist Thomas Gallaudet in founding the asylum for deaf-mutes at Hartford, where he taught many years. The family occupied the Lydia Sigourney house, the former home of the "Swan of Hartford" so that in Hartford also his associations were literary.
Education
From the Hartford High School Henry Beers passed his examinations for Yale College in 1864, when he was slightly over seventeen years of age. Partly on account of his youth and partly on account of his health he was kept out of college for a year and entered Yale as a member of the class of '69. The composition of this class was exceptional in that there were enrolled in it a number of men who had fought through the Civil War. They were both older than the normal Yale undergraduate and less amenable to discipline. Beers was an able student. He won first prize in English composition and the prize for an original English poem in his sophomore year; a Philosophical Oration appointment in his junior year; and a High Oration appointment in his senior year. Yet he was far from being merely a student. He participated in the various extracurriculum activities of his day. In the debating society, Brothers in Unity, he won the first prize in its junior debate; he was a member of Kappa Sigma Epsilon, Alpha Delta Phi, and Skull and Bones; a member of the Varuna Boat Club, the Red Letter Literary Club, and a contributor to the Yale Literary Magazine. Such diverse interest reflected the breadth of his nature, and his college course was successful in the three directions, study, books, friends. On leaving college he studied law in the office of Pierrepont, Stanley, Langdell & Brown, and was admitted to the bar in May 1870.
Career
Beers’ law practise was not so lucrative but that he was willing to resign it to accept the position of tutorin Yale College. There his life followed the usual routine of appointment: tutor, 1871-1874; assistant professor, 1875-1880; professor, 1880-1916; professor emeritus, 1916-26. The only breaks in this succession were in the summer and autumn of 1876 when he studied in Europe, chiefly at Heidelberg with Kuno Fischer, where, with characteristic modesty he remarks, "I attended a few lectures, " and some weeks in 1877 when he attended Bronson Alcott's School of Philosophy at Concord, where he had the opportunity of knowing Lowell and Emerson. For forty continuous years he taught at Yale where his slight figure was a familiar and greatly beloved sight on the campus.
In spite of his dislike of publicity, his great knowledge of English literature and his keen critical judgment won him admirers, but he refused all honorary degrees; "empty honors" he called them. Two of his students, however, in 1923 founded in Yale College the Henry A. Beers Prize in American Literature as a memorial to him. Toward the end of his life he became a personified Yale tradition, one who embodied the past in himself and stood for the best in old Yale.
Beers's published work may be divided into three classes: his poetry; his creative prose; his scholarly prose. His poetry varied from vers de société to dramatic monologue, from burlesque to intimate studies of New England landscape. The sonnet, "The Singer of One Song, " and the dramatic monologue, "The Dying Pantheist, " are both well known. The preference of the author was, however, for the poems dealing with scenery around New Haven, such as "The Upland, " "The Pasture Bars, " or "Beaver Pond Meadow. " His creative prose consisted for the most part of short stories contributed to various magazines. They show his interest in the subtleties of everyday life. He aimed to present only those moments when the soul is at the crossroads and a slight impetus may change the course of life. His scholarly work is best represented by his volumes on the history of romanticism in England. Here he was the first to trace the development of this movement in English literature from its slow beginnings in the first quarter of the eighteenth century to its culmination in the age of Walter Scott (History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century, 1899) and then to its decline in the Victorian period (History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century, 1901).