UWI Tribute to Edward Baugh

The College of the West Indies (UWI) mourns the passing of Emeritus Professor of English, Edward Alston Cecil Baugh, a quintessential scholar and gentleman who exemplified the beliefs of The College of the West Indies, each as a pupil and later as an instructional who spent thirty-five immensely productive and intellectually impactful years right here as a instructor, author, administrator, and scholar. His dying on December 9, 2023 represents an immense loss to Caribbean literary research. A Renaissance man, Professor Emeritus Edward Baugh, was a poet, scholar, instructor, actor, and relentless proselytizer for Anglophone Caribbean literature and criticism.

In line with Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, “Professor Edward Baugh blazed a path throughout the cosmos of Caribbean literature, producing alongside the journey a silver mild that illuminated paths for these round and to come back. His type was with out hurry; he was super-cool, calm, and prompted no warmth. It was a magical efficiency from the maestro. These of us who basked in his glow had been amazed by the dignity of all the pieces he stated and did. The bar was set too excessive for these in haste. He was to be admired and never imitated. He was the bearer of our collegial customary; gentility at its most interesting; as a lot saint as scholar. Blessings upon the soul of ‘Baugh the Vivid’. Could his mild shine on by way of eternity.”

Born in 1936, in Port Antonio, Baugh attended Titchfield Excessive College, and subsequently the College Faculty of the West Indies the place he obtained his Bachelor of Arts diploma in English in 1957. Subsequent, he attended Queens College in Canada, gaining the MA English (1959), and the College of Manchester in the UK for his PhD (1964).  Returning to the Caribbean, he taught at The UWI Cave Hill campus from 1965 to 1967, after which on the Mona campus the place he had an extended and storied profession from 1968 to 2001 as an excellent scholar, inspiring instructor, and nice poet who established and adhered to the best requirements of excellence.

A grasp instructor, Baugh supplied constant and forward-looking tutorial management that helped to rework the colonial curriculum right into a extra various and inclusive one which fostered essential and scholarly engagement with a spread of nationwide and regional literatures and genres. He launched literary concept programs into each the undergraduate and graduate curricula, thus making certain that literary research at UWI stored abreast of latest currents within the self-discipline. His embrace of the brand new was balanced by a even handed understanding of the necessity to additionally preserve programs from the standard Western canon. His pedagogical philosophy was humanist and cosmopolitan in each sense of the time period, firmly rooted within the native however at all times engaged with the worldwide. His deservedly stellar status as a critic of anglophone Caribbean literature rests on this broad and deep basis.

As an instructional critic, Baugh lined all literary genres however temperamentally he was interested in the criticism of poetry, significantly the poetry of Derek Walcott whose inventive and metaphorically complicated engagement with language, panorama, historical past, race, originality and mimicry resonated with Baugh’s personal notion of the function of Caribbean writers and critics. His scholarship enhanced the college’s status as a centre for excellence in Caribbean literary research. His authoritative and incisive survey of West Indian poetry, West Indian Poetry 1900-1970: A Examine in Cultural Decolonisation (1971), supplied a roadmap to the aesthetic and thematic evolution of the style, and it introduced his presence as an essential and influential Caribbean literary critic. His curiosity within the symbiotic relationship between criticism and inventive writing knowledgeable his enhancing of Critics on Caribbean Literature (1978), and his contribution as Caribbean Editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Publish-Colonial Literatures. He cemented his status as an internationally acclaimed skilled on Derek Walcott’s work with the publication of magisterial research akin to Reminiscence as Imaginative and prescient (the primary book-length research of Derek Walcott’s poetry), an erudite and definitive annotated version of Walcott’s One other Life (2004), an encyclopedic overview of Derek Walcott’s oeuvre, Derek Walcott (2005), and a brief biography of Walcott, Derek Walcott (2017).  Baugh additionally printed a definitive research of one other influential Caribbean literary determine titled, Frank Collymore: A Biography (2009).

His multifaceted and multitalented qualities had been additionally expressed in poetry. He was a nice poet with a very lyrical and elegiac sensibility as evidenced in his three collections of poetry: A Story from the Rainforest (1988), It Was the Singing (2000) and Black Sand: New and Chosen Poems (2013).

His contribution to administrative and public service at UWI was excellent: he served a number of phrases as Head of the Division, and Dean of his College. He additionally served as Chairman of the College Library Committee, Chairman of the Mona Library Committee, Chairman of the Mona Campus Committee for Larger Levels and its successor, the Committee for Graduate Research, and Chairman of the Mona Campus Committee on Examinations. He additionally served on the College Appointments Committee and because the Mona Educational Board consultant on the College Educational Committee. He was an eloquent and magisterial Public Orator for seventeen years (1985- 2002), and the standard of his oratory is clear in a printed choice of citations, Chancellor, I Current (1998). His unstinting dedication to public service noticed him serving on the Broadcasting Fee of Jamaica, the Board of Administration of the Nationwide Library, the Council of the Institute of Jamaica, and as Chairman of the Board of Administrators of Institute of Jamaica Publications. Since 2013 he was Chair of the Poet Laureate Committee of the Nationwide Library of Jamaica.

He acquired a Vice-Chancellor’s award in 1995 for instructing and administration, and a Commander of the Order of Distinction (CD) in that very same yr for his stellar contributions to Literature, Schooling, and the College of the West Indies. The Institute of Jamaica awarded him a Silver Musgrave medal in 1998 and a Gold Musgrave Medal in 2012 for his contribution to Literature, and the UWI Guild of Graduates gave him the Pelican Award in 1999 for his excellent contribution in literary research and oratory.

Baugh was an internationally revered scholar and author who acquired quite a few invites to lecture about Caribbean literature and to learn his poetry in lots of international locations. He held visiting appointments in Australia, Canada, the UK and america. He was a referee for senior appointments or promotions in varied universities together with Amherst Faculty, Boston College, the College of South Carolina, the College of Michigan, York College, the College of Ibadan, and the College of Malaya. He served as a decide for the celebrated Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Guyana Prize for Literature. He was an lively and essential member of the Affiliation for Commonwealth Literature and Language Research, and he chaired the Organizing Committee for its 9^th Triennial Convention.

Baugh’s achievements had been many and important, and a big a part of his legacy lies within the mental mentoring and nurturing of a number of generations of scholars, a few of whom have gone on to grow to be notable students in their very own proper.  His loss is felt by his previous college students, former colleagues, and most deeply and poignantly by his household. The College of the West Indies mourns with them whereas additionally saluting the mental and inventive large who has handed. Relaxation in peace, Edward Alston Cecil Baugh. Relaxation in peace, Eddie.