In Memoriam: Robert K. Martin

Abstract

Robert K. Martin, professor emeritus at the Universite de Montreal and eminent Whitman scholar, died on February 19, 2012. Professor Martin's career as a scholar and a teacher in every way lived up to the highest standards of humanist research, pedagogy, and dedicated service to the profession and the community at-large.Even a brief overview of Martin's career demonstrates his remarkable range and productivity as a scholar. His ground-breaking contributions began with his highly influential 1975 Partisan Review essay, Whitman's Song of Myself: Homosexual Dream and Vision, followed quickly by his first book, Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979), which, as Jared Gardner wrote in a review of the 1998 expanded edition, reoriented completely the language in which American poetry was discussed, by insisting that homosexuality tells all there is to say about these poems but that without understanding of the centrality of homosexuality the poems say precisely nothing. A great deal that we take for granted today about the viability and centrality of sexuality as a crucial hermeneutic in cultural and literary studies generally, and in Whitman studies specifically, can be traced to the critical posture Martin adopted in Homosexual Tradition and employed there to such productive and persuasive effect.A similar point can be made about Martin's second major intervention in the American literary canon, Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (1986). In this work Martin once again reframed the past in order to foreground its sometimes unexpected connections to the literary, theoretical, and political concerns of the present. In the book's preface Martin wrote: The male couple, as Melville imagined it, can serve as the basis for a reexamination of the way men are called upon to assume roles of power and authority. Melville's representations of alternative relations between men, Martin continued, can serve as an important part of a larger movement that can ally itself to feminist and thinking. In his critical writing Martin was always looking ahead, testing the boundaries of new connections and coalitions, and his invocation here of ecological thinking is one of the earliest I know of what is becoming increasingly familiar today as green criticism. As in so many other instances, Robert Martin got there first.Two vital and recurring aspects of Martin's career are also especially noteworthy, for they encapsulate what made him not only a uniquely vibrant scholar and teacher, but a dear and valued colleague as well. …