Edward R. Weismiller ’38

Edward R. Weismiller ’38, a poet, author, scholar, one of the world’s foremost experts on Milton, and beloved English professor at George Washington University, died Aug. 25, 2010, in Washington, D.C.

Weismiller first won recognition for his writing while an undergraduate at Cornell. In 1936, he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize for his collection of poetry “The Deer Come Down.” At age 20, he was the youngest poet to win the prize, a record that still stands.

He earned a master’s degree from Harvard in 1942, served with the Office of Strategic Services in counterespionage during World War II, and in 1950 earned a Ph.D. from Oxford University in England, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. After his experience during World War II, he wrote the espionage novel “The Serpent Sleeping.”

Weismiller taught at Pomona College in southern California before joining the faculty at George Washington University in 1968. While there he continued to write, and his third collection of poems “The Branch of Fire” was published in 1970. His final book of poetry “Walking Toward the Sun” was published in 2002.

After retiring from GWU in 1980, he continued his research, and in 2002, he was Scholar in Residence at the Library of Congress, producing “A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton” and a line-by-line analysis of the versifications of Milton’s minor poems. He won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, and, in 2001, the Robert Fitzgerald Award for lifetime contribution to the study of metrics and versification.

He is survived by five children, nine grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.