UNO English major, Claudia Moomey, recently met with Dr. Robert Darcy, a professor in the English department at University of Nebraska-Omaha, to interview him about his current research. He is currently on a sabbatical, finishing up a book that has been about fifteen years in the making. This book is an anthology of Renaissance verse satire, poems that are virtually impossible for modern readers to understand without the help of an editor, and many of which have never been edited before. It is currently at the review stage for consideration by academic publishers. Dr. Darcy has already used parts of the manuscript as a textbook for students in his undergraduate and graduate courses on satire, and he speaks warmly of the rewarding work of those classes in which students participated alongside him in the editing process. Dr. Darcy describes the editing process of these rarely studied poems as “digging up hidden treasures never before unlocked.”
Dr. Darcy has also just published a new book entitled Misanthropoetics, which grew out of his doctoral dissertation. The book’s epilogue makes use of his work on satire, and it was while working on this chapter that he discovered the difficulty of reading these poems. He describes them as consisting of “snarling, barking” sounds, words that are rough on the ear, made up of themes and references that the modern reader would not be familiar with. Dr. Darcy decided to work up the annotations to make these poems readable, ultimately creating a hefty 800-page manuscript. The personal notes and studying regarding these satires eventually morphed into his current project that is now in the final stages of being prepared for publication. Once this anthology is adopted for publication, it will be available for students beyond UNO.
