Maury in his office before his class for retired
professionals on poems of Emily Dickinson

Maury (more formally, Professor Emeritus Maurice Kramer) says that he read 1,789 poems by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) in preparation for teaching his course at Brooklyn College's Institute for Retirees in Pursuit of Education. (That's "Brooklyn" as in one of the five boroughs of New York City.) "Some of the poems," he hastens to add, "are very short." He didn't count the poems himself; the number of them in the edition of the poems that he uses is well known, at least by scholars.

The course is titled “Emily Dickinson, Again,” which Maury decided to teach this fall after his course last year on Emily Dickinson attracted such a large crowd that the Institute had to find a larger classroom for him. The class for this year's course is somewhat smaller, with an average attendance of about 35 students. Most of them are repeaters from his course last year, but the poems are different this time around. His students are retired professionals (a few of them are poets themselves), and Maury finds teaching them very gratifying.

Walking to a recent class from his office, Maury was joined by one of his students, a woman using a walking aide but vigorous in manner and opinion. “That Emily Dickinson,” she said, “is crazy! She’s a terrible poet!” Undaunted and unruffled, Maury continued on to his class, which is part poetry reading and commentary by the professor and part discussion group.

Maurie making a point in class
about an Emily Dickinson poem

Maury had selected poems to be covered in his course from the poems compiled in three volumes in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin (Harvard University Press, 1998), and he had grouped them by theme. This class was to be devoted largely to poems with the theme of anguish, but at the start Maury said he would read “one more love poem before the misery poems.” Maury reads the poems in a low-key but highly effective manner, and makes enlightening comments about them on the basis of his years as a scholar and teacher of nineteenth century American literature.

Maury says that in preparing his courses on Emily Dickinson, he spent the largest part of his time deciding how to read the poems, which required him to interpret them. In the process, he made some new discoveries. In the love poem that he discussed in his recent class, for instance, which was written in 1864 and begins with the line, “The Luxury to apprehend,” he noticed for the first time that the third line in each of the two stanzas is grammatically related both to the preceding two lines and to the following lines in the stanza. This sort of strategic complexity was unusual and quite remarkable for an American poet at the time, Maury said, and he characterized Emily Dickinson as one of only two experimental American poets of that era (the other being Walt Whitman).

The first poem of anguish that Maury took up in the class begins with the line, “The first Day’s Night had come,” and ends with, “Could it be Madness – this?” The poem, written in 1862, refers to something that had happened to the poet the year before. It seems that something had, in fact, happened to Emily Dickinson the year before, but exactly what is not known. Maury’s interpretation of the poem, and the consensus of the class, was that the poem referred to the poet’s experience of an episode of madness.

Accordingly, the poem was construed as being about feeling moments of insanity and then recalling them. Maury characterized it as a poem of “terror and endurance.” Arguably, the student who had railed about Emily Dickinson on the way to the class was half-right – the poet had, apparently, experienced some episodes of insanity – but only half-right, because Emily Dickinson is generally regarded as one of the greatest American poets.

Lots and lots of books - Maury at his desk
in his study at home, in Brooklyn, New York

The students in Maury’s classes have usually included many more women than men, with the exception of a course he gave on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. That course attracted more male students than usual, and for that reason, Maury is considering offering another course on Melville that would cover a few of his shorter works. On the other hand, he would like very much to offer a course on Henry James, and has been thinking about giving one on “Two Revolutionary Novels,” James’ The Princess Casamassima, which, Maury says, is about “anarchy from an esthetic point of view,” and William Dean Howell’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, a novel set against the background of a violent streetcar strike in New York City in 1890.

Maury himself is not any anarchist or revolutionary, but lest one think that he is altogether a staid professorial type, it should be noted here that he and his wife Elaine started about 40 years ago to play blackjack on vacations in Aruba, and many years ago they bought a timeshare there. In the 70’s they made several trips to Las Vegas to play blackjack, and when Maury recalls those trips, a conversation that he and his wife had with a cab driver when they were coming home from one of them comes to mind.

Maury and his wife had taken the cab at the airport and were on the way to their house in Brooklyn. The cab driver got lost, so there was time for a lengthy conversation. When the driver learned that Maury and his wife had been playing blackjack in Las Vegas, he showed them a Gamblers Anonymous badge, and asked them how big a stake they played with. When they answered, “five dollars,” the driver turned around in his seat and regarded them with withering disdain. “You’re not gamblers!” he sneered. In fact, modest gamblers that they are, Maury and his wife plan to give up the timeshare in Aruba because the minimum stake in the casino there has gotten too high for their taste.

Maury received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard, in 1958, and the title of his Ph.D. dissertation is, “The Fable of Endurance: Transition in the American Novel from Romance to Realism.” He concluded, however, that what the American novel had transitioned to was not realism but, rather, “a sense of lives enduring a version of realism.” What does that mean? Read the book! Or, rather, the dissertation.

Maury’s wife is from Brooklyn, and when they married, in 1959, they took up residence there. This required Maury to commute for two years from Brooklyn to New Brunswick, New Jersey, to teach at Rutgers University, where he had been teaching since 1957. He was thankful to be hired as an instructor by Brooklyn College in 1961, and taught there for 39 years. He served as chairman of its English Department from 1970 to 1975, and as dean of the School of Humanities from 1979 to 1981.

When Maury chaired the English Department, the City University of New York, of which Brooklyn College is a part, had instituted a policy of open admissions that resulted in a rise of the College’s enrollment from 13,000 to 35,000. So it is not surprising that in a biographical note for the 50th reunion of his class at Central High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Maury wrote that his five years as chairman of the English department “was as much as I could bear.”

As dean of the School of Humanities, Maury’s job was to do away with the School, which had been created in the first place as part of a reorganization designed to accommodate the huge increase in enrollment that had resulted from open admissions. By the time Maury took on the job of dean of the School, the City University’s senior colleges, including Brooklyn College, had tightened admission requirements, and the College underwent a huge decrease in enrollment, back to 13,000. The tighter admission requirements also made unnecessary the remedial education that had been offered under the open admissions policy. It is Maury’s view that Brooklyn College had been doing a great job with remedial education during those years of open admissions. (That’s a subject for a book, but, Maury says, he isn’t going to write it.)

In his biographical note for his Central High reunion, Maury noted that his publications included the “Library of Literary Criticism, ed. with Dorothy Nyren and Elaine Kramer (and our marriage survived).” He has also published many articles on American literature, particularly Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Stoddard, Stephen Crane, and R.P. Blackmur.

Maury was born and raised in the Kensington area of Philadelphia, where his father had a hardware store. Maury speaks with respect of the job of running a hardware store, at least, the hardware store of old, as being one that takes a certain kind of genius – all those thousands of items to manage – but it wasn’t the job for him. After Central High School, he went to the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, where he received his B.A. and an M.A. in English.

As an undergraduate, Maury’s first choice of a major was journalism. For a course given by an editorial writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer he wrote an editorial about China (this was in 1948), giving his opinion that the United States should stay out of the war there, and let the Communists deal with China’s huge problems. The only comment that his teacher made about Maury’s paper was, “You may be right.”

Right or not, Maury thought that if the teacher thought that Maury, a mere student, was right, journalism had to be too easy a field to be worth devoting his life to. He switched his major to English, but he did become editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian, the University’s student newspaper for male undergraduates (at the time, the women students had their own paper).

Maury and his wife have traveled extensively, and not just to play blackjack. Many of their trips have been to places where Elaine’s brother, who was in the U.S. State Department’s foreign service, was posted. As a result, they have traveled extensively in Africa, as well as in Europe. Objects acquired on their travels are displayed in the living room of their house, which, like the house in Philadelphia in which Maury grew up, is in an area called Kensington, but this house is in the Kensington area of Brooklyn.