Paul Fredrick Betz

Paul was born in Philadelphia PA, the son of Frederick P. Betz and Celeste (Wills) Betz. The eldest of seven children, he was raised on Betz Nurseries in Hatboro PA near his paternal grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. He roamed the woodlands, farm fields, and marshes, developing a lifelong interest in plants and the beauty of nature.

Paul earned a BA in English at LaSalle College, Philadelphia PA and a PhD in English Literature at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. He met his wife Dorothy Marshall Betz, PhD in French, at Cornell and they married there. Soon after, they moved to McLean VA, where they happily enjoyed home and garden, and their careers in academia.

Paul was a stalwart of Georgetown University. When applying for jobs after completing a distinguished doctoral thesis at Cornell, he received offers from Princeton, Columbia, and Yale, but chose Georgetown as his home. He regarded that choice as representing a commitment on which he would never renege.

Not for a moment was he deterred by what would now be regarded as an overwhelming teaching load of four courses a semester; on the contrary, he approached his teaching with exactly the same seriousness of purpose he gave to everything else. During the course of his 42-year career, he taught 234 courses to approximately 2,460 undergraduates and 1,090 graduate students. Over the years he taught many students who came back, sometimes decades later, to thank him for his hard work and dedication. Some of them who became book collectors (a passion sparked by him) would serve alongside him on the Georgetown University Library Board, which he was responsible for founding.

He quickly became involved in the running of the university; indeed, it is hard to see how the institution could have survived without him. In 1971 he became a member of the university Senate and would remain so for the next 36 years, serving as its president from 1991 to 1993. For his department, he served two terms as department chair, taking responsibility for hirings and other administrative matters. He served also, for fifteen years, on the most important committee in the university, the Rank and Tenure committee.

Impressive though these achievements might be, it was as an academic researcher that Paul remains most distinguished. He commanded an international reputation as a Wordsworth scholar well before he became a regular lecturer at the Wordsworth Summer Conference, held every year in Grasmere, Cumbria, in the UK. He was known to its organizers in part because he worked tirelessly throughout his summers at the Wordsworth Library, combing through Wordsworth’s manuscripts and notebooks. It was in that Library Paul met Duncan Wu in 1985, introduced to him by Jonathan Wordsworth, and in subsequent years Duncan drove him to far-flung bookshops where he would converse with the dealers he knew so well, and purchase the best of their stock.

He contributed to a number of remarkable volumes about Wordsworth but the achievement for which scholars will always remember him is the Cornell Wordsworth Series edition of Benjamin the Waggoner. There, for the first time, Paul presented to readers the manuscripts that lay behind that important poem, tracing its development through the notebooks kept at Grasmere. It remains a tour de force of scholarly know-how.

It could be argued that Paul’s other great research achievement was his collection of books, letters, manuscripts, and other objects relating to Wordsworth and his circle, by far the largest and most impressive collection of its kind in private hands, which he left to the Lauinger Library at Georgetown. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of discoveries yet to be made in Paul’s collection, and it is bound to attract scholars from all over the world for a long time to come.

Paul is survived by his sisters: Mary Celeste Betz, Gertrude (Joseph) Mihalcik, Margaret (John Chropovka) Betz, and Rose (Jonathan) Betz-Zall; many nieces and nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews; special friends Mary Jane A. Gallagher and Duncan Wu, as well as many colleagues and former students. Paul was preceded in death by his loving wife of 46 years, his brothers Louis and Anthony, and his fiancée Carol Anne Rosen.

from Intimations of Immortality

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now forever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind.

by William Wordsworth