Coe

 Richard Coe was one of my favorites. I took a class on romanticism from him in French. I had previously taken a course on the autobiography of childhood, on which Coe later wrote a brilliant book. 

He criticized my first paper in French, because of the grammatical mistakes. You want to be a scholar, was his tone, you have to have the grammar down.  I never forgot that. 

I remember what I wrote for the autobiography class. It was on how poets writing their autobiographies present the experience of writing their first poem. My idea was this: if they had a condescending attitude toward this experience, they would include the text of the poem. If they presented the experience in idealized terms, then they wouldn't, because the text itself would detract from the idealization. 

I know I talked about Speak, Memory, by Nabokov, who I think idealizes the experience. I could recreate a lit the other books from the course by reading Coe's book.  

He liked my paper.