Kurth Sprague

1934 - 2007

A poet, novelist, popular professor of English and American Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, horseman and bon vivant, Kurth Sprague lived an eclectic life with gusto. He died Sunday, March 18, 2007, in Fort Worth at the age of 73.

Funeral: 2 p.m. Wednesday at Episcopal Church of The Good Shepherd, 3201 Windsor Road in Austin. The Rev. Hugh Magee of Dundee, Scotland, a fellow student at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., will officiate. Burial: Sandy Cemetery in Sandy. Visitation: Kurth will lie in state 2 to 8 p.m. Tuesday at Weed-Corley-Fish Funeral Home, 3125 N. Lamar Blvd., Austin, where the family will be present 6 to 8 p.m.

Pallbearers: Robin Clements, Allert Brown-Gort, Eric Mills, Thomas Cable, James Lux, Douglas More, Frank Sprague and William Schultz. Honorary pallbearers: Daniel Leary, Mel Behrends, Thomas Beckett, John Hettinger, Robert King, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith and John Chalmers.

Memorials: His memory may be honored with a gift to The National Horse Protection Coalition, www.horse-protection.org, Box 1252, Alexandria, Va. 22313.

Kurth was born March 11, 1934, in Jersey City, N.J. He grew up in Manhattan and went to St. Paul's School and to college at Princeton, but eventually moved to West Lake Hills, where he and his second wife, Bushie, owned and operated Blackacre Stable. Their home on the top of a hill above a hunt course drew students and scholars, medieval musicians, writers and riders and English ecclesiastics, often in overlapping categories, sometimes to the astonishment of his children, Mark, Quin, David and Charlotte.

Falstaffian in his exuberance, Sprague was a large and imposing but gentle man. The workings of his mind were as colorful as the medieval Celtic art that he loved.

A graduate of St. Paul's School in New Hampshire and Princeton University (1956), he received his doctorate in English from UT-Austin, writing his dissertation on T.H. White, the British author of "The Once and Future King." A revised version of the dissertation is in press, prompted by a widespread, renewed interest in medievalism. It will be published posthumously under the editorial supervision of Dr. Bonnie Wheeler of Southern Methodist University.

Related to his dissertation are collections that he edited of White's poetry ("A Joy Proposed," 1980) and short stories ("The Maharajah and Other Stories," 1982). These books followed his first edited publication in 1977, the poetry of Ruth P.M. Lehmann, his teacher of Old English and Old Irish at UT-Austin.

Sprague's own published writings include three volumes of poetry: "And Therefore With Angels" (1970), "My Father's Mighty Heart" (1974) and "The Promise Kept," which won the Texas Institute of Letters poetry award for 1976. His deep knowledge of the American equestrian scene is displayed in his 470-page history of The National Horse Show, 1883-1983 (1985). Two of the strands of his life, academe and horses, are brought together in a murder mystery, "Frighten the Horses" (2003).

Oddly enough, the two strands had been brought together years earlier during his service in the Army, when he was assigned to the Department of Publications and non-resident training at the Artillery and Guided Missile School at Fort Sill, Okla. As Sprague said years later, it was his writing ability in that assignment, rather than any athletic prowess, that caused him to be appointed to the United States Modern Pentathlon Team, which trained at Fort Sam Houston.

Sprague taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1977 until his retirement in 1996. In 1983 he served as the editorial director for the Centennial Commission Report, and afterward he wrote the charter for the Texas Foundation on Higher Education.

The courses that he taught in the English Department and in American Studies included "King Arthur in English Literature," "Medieval Literature in Translation," "American Medievalism" and "American Chivalry."

A lover of English poetry, he would continue his conversations outside the classroom with friends, students and former students. He was happy to spend hours passionately reciting and discussing the magic of Sir Thomas Wyatt's "The flee from me, that sometime did me seek," Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, Robert Herrick's "Delight in Disorder" or Swinburne's "When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces."

Rusty Coulter, the narrator of "Frighten the Horses," says to his students: "It will not escape your notice that this class not only confines itself to English literature, but that we read mostly poetry which includes the work not only of English poets but that of all those desperately talented Irish, Scots, and Welsh odds and sods writhing under the intolerable yoke of perfidious Albion." The narrator continues, thinking: "I could hear myself, the out-of-date diction, the legacy of irony-besmitten masters from the New Hampshire pile of stones inexpugnably imprinted in my memory and influencing my teaching style."

Roger Louis, the Mildred Caldwell and Baine Perkins Kerr Centennial Chair in English and Culture at UT-Austin, said, "He was the best of friends, a loyal supporter of British Studies at the University of Texas and a rare example of chivalry in American public life."

As a widower, Kurth Sprague lived in the Texas Hill Country in a house that reflected his epicurean hospitality and his love of books, horses, tweeds, England, "Der Rosenkavalier," art, food, drink and good friends. In recent years, he had enjoyed the company of traveling and entertaining with Martha Hyder of Fort Worth.

Kurth was preceded in death by his wife, Ruth McNamara Sprague.

Survivors: His sons, Mark D. Chambers and his wife, Julie, of Trophy Club, Quin John Sprague of London and David Chase Cameron Sprague and his wife, Dawn, of Temple; his daughter, Charlotte Clare Ratliff Sprague and her partner, Elizabeth Brown, of Atlanta; grandchildren, Brian Chambers, Kate Chambers, William Sprague and Maren Sprague; cousin, Frank Sprague; devoted companion and friend, Martha Rowan Hyder; and friends, Robin Stewart Clements and Allert Brown-Gort.