Paul Fry

Paul H. Fry, BA Berkeley, Ph D Harvard, began teaching at Yale in 1971. His primary fields are British Romanticism, the History of Criticism, Literary Theory and Literature and Painting. He is also a painter and has written art criticism for Art News. The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (1980) received the Melville Caine Award of the Poetry Society of America. He was Director of Graduate Studies in English for eighteen years and Head (then Master) of Yale’s Ezra Stiles College for seven. He served as Chair and Member of the Region II Committee for the Mellon Fellowships in the Humanities for twenty-five years. His online lecture course, “Introduction to Literary Theory,” can be viewed as an OpenYale lecture course or on YouTube. He is the 2011 winner of the Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teaching Award from the Kennedy Center for the Arts. For many years he was Executive Co-Director of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and its national counterpart, the Yale National Initiative. In addition to the book mentioned above, with a Coleridge edition and many articles and reviews, he has written The Reach of Criticism (1983), William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice (1991), A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (1995), Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (2008), and Theory of Literature (2012).