Hiram Corson

Born in Philadelphia on November 6, 1828, Hiram Corson became one of the early American professors devoted to English literature as a serious academic field. He is best remembered for his years at Cornell University, where he taught generations of students and built a reputation as a lively interpreter of poetry.

Corson wrote criticism and studies on major authors including Shakespeare and Robert Browning, and he was known for stressing the sound and feeling of poetry as much as its meaning on the page. That approach made him stand out in an era when literary study was still finding its place in American universities.

He died in 1911, leaving behind a body of scholarship and teaching that helped widen the audience for literary study. For listeners today, his work offers a glimpse of a moment when reading literature aloud, carefully and with feeling, was treated as an art in itself.