Once in a lifetime, if you're lucky, you h Camille Paglia ave a great teacher. Mine was Milton Kessler. He is everywhere in my memories of Harpur College in the 1960s. He was at the poetry readings and raucous receptions afterward at remote faculty houses. Milton Kessler embodies for me an ideal of the arts in dynamic synthesis.
Great teachers live their subject.
The subject teaches itself through them. It uses them and, in return, charges them with elemental energy. I have never been the same since. Kessler teaching Roethke or Walt Whitman stressed the body-rhythms and organic pulses that underlie all poetry. Reading poetry aloud, Kessler made great use of dynamics.