Robert M. Pack

Robert M. Pack

Robert M. Pack died peacefully at his home in the Swan Valley on June 5th at the age of ninety-four, hours after philosophically enduring yet another loss by his beloved Red Sox. Patty, his devoted wife of over sixty years, was by his side. Bob was an accomplished poet, teacher, essayist, Shakespeare devotee, opera buff, joke teller, raconteur, baseball fan, and lover of nature. He lived a rich and full life and will be missed by his wife, three children, and many friends and former students across the country.

Bob was born in New York City in 1929. His father was a lawyer who served in the New York state legislature, and his mother was a homemaker. He grew up in the Bronx playing sports, attending games, making friends, and escaping into the country during summer vacations with his younger sister Marian. He remembered his early childhood as golden. His indulgent parents let him keep the various animals and other natural specimens he brought home, allowing him a room dedicated solely to his scientific activities. In the fifth grade he entered the Fieldston School of Ethical Culture, where much of his worldview was formed and where he made friends he would retain for over seventy years.

Bob majored in English literature and philosophy at Dartmouth College, graduating in 1951. While doing graduate work at Columbia University he taught courses in poetry at The New School for Social Research. After receiving his M.A. in 1953, he was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to travel to Italy and translate the work of poet Gabriele D'Annunzio. Following his return to the U.S. he was hired by Barnard College, where he taught literature for six years. Some of his Barnard students went on to distinguished literary careers.

Bob married economist Patricia Powell in 1961. Patty was a mainstay whose love and support were crucial to his professional career. They would have three children together, and he loved to recall events from Erik's, Pamela's, and Kevin's childhoods.

In 1962 he joined the faculty of Middlebury College, where he designed and chaired the creative writing program, taught a wide variety of classes including poetry writing, English and American literature, and the Hebrew Bible. During his career he received a number of awards for teaching excellence. For twenty-two summers he served as Director of the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, the nation's premier gathering of creative writers, whose approaches and practices he helped shape. During these summers he also taught in Middlebury's English literature graduate program.

After Bob's retirement from Middlebury in 1998, he and Patty moved to Montana, where their son Erik designed and built for them a log home with spectacular views of the Swan Mountains. A year later Bob unretired and began teaching in the Honors College at The University of Montana. He initiated a course called Ways of Knowing, which remains the introductory course for the program's students. It reflects his interest in how writers from different disciplines comprehend the world and encourages college freshmen to examine their assumptions about human knowledge and experience. Bob sometimes team-taught sections of that course with colleagues from English, Political Science, Philosophy, and Environmental Studies.

A nationally acclaimed poet, Pack published twenty-one collections of poetry, a number of them with the University of Chicago Press. He also published book-length critical studies of Shakespeare, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. Even after the move to Montana, the books kept coming. During his last few years, when Bob used a wheelchair and became increasingly blind, he continued to write and publish poetry with the help of his wife and friends. Just before his death, which he knew was imminent, he was happy to compete his final collection of poems, which will be published by Slant Press this fall under the title Searching for Home.

Helped by numerous recorded books, nightly opera broadcasts, and a digital assistant, Bob stayed fully engaged with his many intellectual and artistic interests until the very end. They included Freudian psychology, evolutionary theory, cosmology, primatology, classical and quantum physics, human aggression, sexuality, compassion, the Hebrew Bible, classical music, and the nation of Israel. He followed current events, the Red Sox, and the television show Seinfield. He loved to visit with his friends' dogs.

Late in life Bob was sustained by weekly lunch meetings with a small circle of Missoula friends. He would bring talking points he wished to pursue, attend happily as the conversation moved to other topics, inquire about his companions' lives, and encourage their writing, filmmaking, and teaching. He was an inveterate punster and teller of Jewish jokes, and he loved to reminisce about the dramatic highlights of his life: pushing Roy Cohn out of his childhood sandbox, teasing Stephen Sondheim and being teasingly reminded of it decades later, standing up to a circle of Bronx bullies, trying to adopt an elephant, defeating Norman Mailer at arm wrestling, holding conversations with Robert Frost, experiencing Harold Bloom's wonderful idiosyncrasies, as a young man being followed everywhere by his pet duck, and his friendship with a bobcat. Hundreds of lines from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Frost, Stevens, Yeats, and other poets poured from his prodigious memory, often in uncannily relevant response to something someone had mentioned. A joke was never far away.

Bob made lasting friends of dozens of classmates, colleagues, and students and he continued to hear from them long after their paths in life diverged. His was a unique and powerful presence that will live on for all who knew or read him.

To date his death announcement on Facebook has received over five hundred responses from friends and admirers.

He is survived by wife Patty; children Erik, Pamela, and Kevin; sister Marian; and grandson Slayden.