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REMARKS BY PRESIDENT JOANNE V. CREIGHTON TO VIRGINIA HAMILTON
ADAIR
ON THE OCCASION OF HER HONORARY DEGREE
Virginia Hamilton Adair: nationally
acclaimed poet and for twenty-two years professor at California
Polytechnic University: you provide a shining example to poets of
all ages and you are an inspiration to all who believe in the power
of a liberal arts education.
Born in 1913 in the Bronx, New York, you spent your entire childhood
in communion with poetry, in a home where, as your friend and colleague
Robert Mezey describes it, "poetry was an intimate and essential
part of life and had nothing to do with worldly ambition or celebrity."
Your father himself was a poet, and he and your mother began as
soon as you were born to share with you their deep appreciation
for literature. By the time you applied to Mount Holyoke College,
you had already been a poet in your own right for many years, having
begun writing at the age of six.
You first demonstrated your talents in the Mount Holyoke community
when, in 1930, you won the Jessie Goodwin Spaulding Award for sight
translation of Latin. You attracted the attention of a broader constituency
when you were selected to represent Mount Holyoke in 1931, 1932,
and 1933 at the annual Katherine Irene Glasscock Intercollegiate
Poetry Contest. Held on campus annually for the past seventy-five
years, this contest is the College's oldest running event. It has
been judged by such prominent poets as Robert Frost, W.H. Auden
and Marianne Moore and has launched several of this century's most
celebrated poets, including Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, and Mary
Jo Salter. After placing second in your first year as the Mount
Holyoke representative, you were declared the winner of this prestigious
contest in both 1932 and 1933. By the 1940s, you had earned an invitation
to be one of the judges.
In the years immediately following your graduation, Phi Beta Kappa,
from Mount Holyoke, you earned masters degrees in English from Harvard
University and the University of Wisconsin. You published poems
in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and The Saturday
Review of Literature, but although you continued to create poems
over the next several decades, you no longer sought publication,
and instead devoted your energies to teaching, scholarship, your
marriage, and your three children.
We are indeed fortunate that you consented in the late 1980s to
cull from the thousands of poems you had produced by that time a
small collection which would become Ants on the Melon, your
first published volume, in 1996. The New York Times Book Review
called you a poet of "accomplishment and originality," singing in
" a voice undiminished by time." After considerable success and
acclaim, Beliefs and Blasphemies, your second volume, appeared
in 1998, and your audience eagerly awaits the volume you are now
in the process of editing.
When asked about your first-place standing in the Glasscock contests
of 1932 and 1933, you commented, "I felt that I was winning it for
the College, not just for myself." Robert Mezey, in reflecting on
your decision to embrace poetry as a vocation rather than write
for publication, observed, "There was never any question in her
mind that what matters is the health of the spirit, not the acclaim
of the great world." In your work and in your life, you demonstrate
the ideal of the alliance of liberal arts education with purposeful
engagement in the world. You are truly one of Mount Holyoke's most
distinguished alumnae.
I am proud and pleased, after sixty years, to have this opportunity
once again to recognize your prodigious poetic talent and to acknowledge
your contribution to Mount Holyoke College by bestowing upon you
the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.
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