All Scholars

Like several of his Toronto colleagues, Roger Beck (1937-2023), T.M. Robinson (1936-2023), Joan Bigwood (1937-2017), Elaine Fantham (1933-2016), and D.F.S. Thomson (1919-2009), Alexander Dalzell was born in the UK and rigorously trained in elite British universities before emigrating to Canada. Some of them focused on their research, but like Roger Beck at UTM, Dalzell not only maintained his research program but made so exceptional a commitment to his college by serving as Dean of Arts and Vice Provost that his college made him an honorary fellow on his retirement.

          As a classicist, Dalzell is also remarkable for producing his major work eight years after his retirement as a contribution to Toronto's prestigious Robson Classical Lectures series. Publishing so significant a book in a period when most scholars have concluded their research. The Criticism of Didactic Poetry: Essays on Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid addresses how modern readers should approach instructional poetry, which was underappreciated since the Romantic period (Dalzell cites Shelley's dismissal of the genre as an “abhorrence.”). Reviewers, particularly Joseph Farrell and R.J. Tarrant note that the book creates no theoretical structure upon which to read Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, Virgil's Georgics, and Ovid's Ars Amatoria for the first time, but to offer fresh critical interpretive insights into the poems. Subsequent reception of the book took Dalzell’s work as a starting point, itself a sign of an important work, from which scholars agreed or took issue well into the twenty-first century.  

          Along with D.F.S. Thomson and R.A.B. Mynors, Dalzell contributed largely uncredited English translations of Erasmus’s work to the University of Toronto Press's monumental Collected Works of Erasmus project. Dalzell spent decades translating volumes of Erasmus’s vast correspondence. In this he joined arguably one of the major projects of twentieth-century Canadian classical scholarship. This quiet, long-term foundational scholarly service was essential to making important sources available to future generations and is reminiscent of great German projects of the nineteenth century. As the years pass, the value of the project is enlarged as younger scholars consult it. 

          Dalzell prioritized institutional service over scholarship, but when he was free to work in his given field, he did not uncover new sources or refine texts (as did, say, his colleague Thomson) but he made substantial contributions in both the critical study of already well-studied works and his translations.