February marks the start of the Longfellow Days in Brunswick! While in-person events are not being held this year, the Longfellow Days committee is still finding ways to celebrate the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow through this year’s theme of letters and letter writing. This year, we’d like to make our own contribution by remembering a man whose love of poetry inspired the Coursen readings that are normally a part of the annual Longfellow Days celebrations - Herbert Randolph Coursen.
| A student of the University of Connecticut with a Ph.D in English, a teacher at Bowdoin College, Clemson University, Ohio University, and the University of Maine at Augusta, a fighter pilot during the 1950s and one of the original members of Maine Veterans for Peace, H.R. Coursen was a man of many talents. According to Nancy E Randolph, publisher with Just Write Books, wrote this in a front-page obituary for The Times Record, “Herbert Randolph (H.R.) Coursen- a talented, brilliant, witty and sometimes irascible man- was passionate about Shakespeare, poetry, sports, music and politics. They enlivened his conversation and defined his life.” Robert Chute of Poland Springs, with whom H.R. Coursen shared numerous poetry readings, had this to say of his friend- “I knew Herb as a fellow U.S. Air Force veteran in Veterans for Peace — his war Korea, mine, World War II. I knew him as a fellow poet, exchanging, without offense or favor, suggestions, edits, corrections. He was an insightful scholar and a writer of astounding diversity. His life, as are all lives, was many things, but much of it was Literature, with a capital L.” |  H.R. Courson. |
 | One of Herb’s particular talents was the recontextualization of works by writers of the past. He rewrote in modern verse the works of Ovid, Euripides, and Virgil, with works like The Iliad, The Aeneid and The Golden Fleece transformed by his pen. One that speaks to the strengths of his writing and his strengths as a person was Longfellow’s Evangeline: An Adaptation in Modern Verse. Initially resistant to the idea of a modern recontextualization of Longfellow’s Evangeline, he wrote in his introduction to the work, “I remembered the narrative as a sentimental story that explained why Longfellow’s longer poems had faded into obscurity. The poem might appeal to Victorian sensibility, but the skeptical and epigrammatic Emily Dickinson seemed much more appealing to current tastes- or at least to mine.” |
| However, when convinced by publisher Nancy E Randolph to give Evangeline another try, he described how his opinion pivoted. “But when I reread Evangeline, I realized that, while the sentimentality was there- a cloying idealization and conventional piety- the story also captured something of the 20th century, and beyond. It is a story of loss, and of searching for people trampled in the shuffle of tyrannies and their wars, of the disruption of cultures, of the shattering of expectations, of the punishment of those who have done no wrong.” Seeing Evangeline in this new light, he took to his modern retelling, and in many ways, both the work itself and the story behind how he came to write it encapsulates the man of Herbert Randolph Coursen himself. |  |
Intelligent and witty, a man who hated computers and loved poetry, H.R. Coursen is remembered by his friends and loved ones as a passionate man of literary power, and by the town of Brunswick, Maine through the Coursen Readings held during the annual celebration of Longfellow Days. Thank you for taking the time to join us in remembering a talented writer, poet and educator and a profoundly one-of-a-kind individual.
Nancy E. Randolph operates Just Write Books LLC offering consulting and coaching to writers. With over 50 years of writing experience and two decades in the publishing industry working with dozens of writers, Randolph has learned how to produce a manuscript that is ready for publication. Randolph uses that knowledge to help writers and authors reach their publishing goals. An active community member along with two others she founded and serves as a member of the board of Save Our Swinging Bridge.Org to ensure the maintenance of the historic Roebling-designed and -built bridge connecting Topsham and Brunswick.
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