Remembered Acts

If you’ve never had a class with Duncan Wu, you may know him as the professor boisterously cheering from the stage every time one of his students’ names is called during commencement.

His enthusiasm is genuine, perhaps buoyed by the reality that despite earning two degrees from Oxford University and teaching at Georgetown for the past 17 years, a part of Wu is surprised that he went to — let alone is now teaching at — university. Or perhaps from knowing how one teacher can change the trajectory of your life.

“It was difficult being a half-Chinese boy in England’s Home Counties, where Chinese people were expected to run laundries and little else,” said Wu, who is the Raymond Wagner Professor in Literary Studies. “Whether for that reason or some other, I managed to win the bad opinion of all my teachers except for one: Alan Burke.”

Wu met Burke when he was 16. Wu’s education performance up to that point could best be described as floundering or, more optimistically, as uninspired. His parents — and most of his teachers — assumed that his educational pursuits would end with high school.

Burke foresaw something else.

“He was the first teacher in my life who thought that I wasn’t an idiot and I deserved some serious attention,” Wu said. “I’m surprised at the number of students, even at Georgetown, who are in the same situation. They’ve never really had serious attention from a literature teacher, and the moment they get it, it makes them different people.”

For Wu, it transformed him into a lover of modern poetry.

“From that point onwards, I was absolutely hooked,” he said. “I couldn’t put poetry down.”

It also made him someone who wanted to study literature at Oxford.

Wu remembers telling his teachers — provocatively, he admits — that he was applying to the prestigious school. They weren’t just dismayed; in fact, they let Wu know in no uncertain terms he didn’t belong at Oxford, informing him that if he applied, they’d write the university telling them all the reasons he shouldn’t be admitted.

“They were true to their word,” Wu said. “But nonetheless, I did apply to Oxford, and the bad reference worked to my advantage. The Oxford professors were almost more interested in me as a result and gave me a place.”

Wu graduated three years later and got a job at the BBC making documentaries about the arts before returning to Oxford to pursue a Ph.D.

To this day, Wu remains a voracious reader — among his current favorite authors are Cormac McCarthy and Philip Larkin — and an equally prolific scholar. Over the years, he has edited and authored at least 26 books and a slew of academic articles about William Wordsworth and the Romantic period, among others. Recently, he added a new descriptor: poet.

“I stopped writing poetry when I was 18,” he said. “I started again about six years ago now, and everything I wrote then was terrible. It was enough to make you want to give up. But I kept going because there were certain things I had inside me that I wanted to say and that I felt I could only say this way.”

Last summer, his first book of poems, Origin Myths, was published by Shearsman Books. In it, he writes about life along the banks of Scott’s Run, which feeds the Potomac in northern Virginia, with a fictional dog named Dakota. There, he explores traces of the Indigenous people who once flourished on the same land.

In the Washington Independent Review of Books, poetry editor and book reviewer (and Georgetown archivist) Amanda Holmes, writes that his poems “demonstrate the power and beauty inherent in classical structures” and that they remind her of the “raw, unsentimental and guttural language of Ted Hughes, which first turned me onto poetry.”

In many ways, the poems are an extension of Wu’s love of America and of being an American.

“I love this country” he said. “That is not a superficial claim. It’s a claim that goes deep inside me, and it’s something that is important to me. I think that if you are an American in a serious way, you should be aware of the history of the country, and should regard yourself as an extension of it.”

The poems are also an extension of growing older. Wu is now in his 60s. He cannot ignore news of people his age “just sort of dying” every day.

In Tintern Abbey, one of his more famous poems about aging and revisiting a meaningful place years later, Wordsworth writes about the pleasures that:

The gift Burke gave Wu nearly half a century ago was a love of poetry and a vision of his life as something expansive rather than circumscribed. It is those acts of encouragement that Wu strives to pass on to his students, whether in the classroom or from the commencement stage. And it is the individual moments — small and large, remembered and unremembered — to which Wu is now memorializing with just the right words and structures.