Published: September 2015
For more than five decades, John Mahoney ’50, MA’52, H’03, taught literature at Boston College, returning to his alma mater after earning a Ph.D. from Harvard. He was a scholar of Romantic poetry and a virtuoso of the classroom, the author or editor of 11 books and the University’s inaugural Rattigan Professor of English. And he was known for his recitations of poems. A 1994 Boston College Magazine profile by editor Ben Birnbaum described their effect: “John’s is not an actor’s instrument—it’s got too little polish and too much Boston in it. Nor is it a siren’s call. Too much straight-ahead power. . . . [But] as John inhabits his gestures, so does he the words he speaks.”
Mahoney published several spoken-word CDs, including one titled Freedom: America’s Literary Voices (2006) that featured the poem “A Psalm of Life” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Click below to hear his rendering.
