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06/13/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 06/13/2025 11:35

Professor Emeritus Ben Howard examines compassion in letter published in Times Literary Supplement

Alfred University News

June 13, 2025

Professor Emeritus Ben Howard examines compassion in letter published in Times Literary Supplement

Professor Emeritus Ben Howard

The June 6 issue of the Times Literary Supplement included a letter by Alfred University Professor Emeritus of English Ben Howard taking issue with a book reviewer's overly casual use of the word "compassion" in a review of Edward White's Dianaworld, an examination of the life and cultural significance of the late Princess Diana, who died in 1997.

The reviewer, Frances Wilson, calls the virtue of compassion "the sign of 'Diananess'" and the "watchword" of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. "Diana's legacy was to be a new age of feeling, or of new-age feeling," Wilson writes.

Howard suggests that Wilson's review relegates compassion to a cultural fashion. Compassion, he writes in TLS, "is hardly something trendy or new."

Howard quotes from the Dalai Lama's 2003 book The Compassionate Life, which characterizes compassion as a virtue that "gives us inner strength, hope, and mental peace."

As Howard observes, at a time "when compassion in and out of government often seems in short supply," it is not a virtue to be "disdained or casually derided."

Howard is the author of twelve books, including six collections of poetry and four collections of essays on Zen practice . His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in leading journals here and abroad, including Poetry, Shenandoah, Poetry Ireland, Agenda, and the Sewanee Review. The Times Literary Supplement, which began publication in 1902, has published numerous letters he has written examining a wide range of issues.

Before Howard's retirement from Alfred University, he taught courses in literature, imaginative writing, and Buddhist meditation and offered private lessons in classical guitar. For twenty years he also led the Falling Leaf Sangha, a Zen practice group open to students and the community.

For more information on his work, visit https://howardbw.com/publications-1973-2012/; https://howardbw.com/curriculum-vita/ and his Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Howard_(poet).

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