David Ferry, Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English, died on Nov. 5, 2023, at the age of 99. David taught at Wellesley for 37 years, from 1952 to 1989. Over the arc of his long career, at Wellesley and afterward, he was an exemplary scholar and teacher, a giant of our faculty, a translator and poet of the highest order, and a major figure in American literature.

David graduated from Amherst College in 1948, having interrupted his undergraduate years to serve in the United States Army Air Force. He went on to receive his doctorate from Harvard University and wrote his thesis on change, death, and eternity in the poetry of Wordsworth. At Wellesley, he taught courses in Romantic poetry, 20th-century poetry, the novel, Shakespeare, 18th-century literature, and composition. David’s students, some of whom are now in their 80s, remember his classes as life-changing, inspiring events. He was a recipient of the Pinanski Prize for Excellence in Teaching in the very first year that it was awarded.

As an influential chair of the English department, David shaped a curriculum and a community where literature, and especially poetry, ranked as a first-class intellectual pursuit as well as a life-enhancing joy. Beyond his department, he served on many College committees, including two full terms on the Committee on Faculty Appointments.

When David retired in 1989, his two books on Wordsworth and two volumes of poetry were very highly regarded, but he had devoted the bulk of his energy to teaching Wellesley students and to serving this College. Nobody could have predicted the astonishing yield of his retirement years, or the influence of his work on a generation of readers. David’s first book in retirement was a translation of the 4,000-year-old Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, which brought that poem back into English literature for a new generation of readers. David then worked assiduously on the major poems of Horace and then of Virgil, culminating in a translation of the Aeneid praised widely as among the finest versions of that poem, published when David was 93. For years, to his former colleagues in the English department, he would make bleak jokes about the actuarial odds of his making it all the way to the end; but he did, and when he finished, he turned to his own dazzlingly original poems.

Those poems are the heart of his achievement. In 2012 his volume entitled Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations won the National Book Award. A growing consensus in the poetry world puts Ferry at the very top of the generation of poets born in the 1920s. The title Bewilderment suggests how little David supposed he understood the world, and how deep and strange and honorable it is to cultivate a humility before the great mysteries—those that we find in poetry, and in life as well.