The Lessons of the Editor

Abstract

someone whose career was indelibly shaped by working as an editorial assistant for New Literary History and whose association with Ralph Cohen has been among the most illuminating influences of my career, I would like to recount those experiences and to speculate about the historical significance that Ralph Cohen's NLH has attained. I was Ralph Cohen's student in a University of Virginia graduate course, From Classic to Romantic, during the spring of 1975, a class that aimed to demonstrate for firstand second-year students the evolution of British poetry from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. We learned just how subtly nuanced these changes were by discovering the difference between innovation and variation within genre, a much more complex history than anything we might have gleaned from reading M. H. Abrams. I was as much at sea as most of my compeers, probably more, and even endured the distinction of having the poem I wrote in imitation of a romantic lyric read aloud as an object model of what not to do. What Professor Cohen didn't know was that