Leonard, William Ellery, House

About this property

The William Ellery Leonard House is a Craftsman-style house built in 1915 in Madison, Wisconsin for William and his second wife Charlotte. William was a poet and UW professor who suffered agoraphobia at times, and spent his most productive years in this house. In 1993 the house was added to the National Register of Historic Places. William Ellery Leonard was born in New Jersey in 1876, the only child of a newspaper editor and a kindergarten teacher. He later wrote that at age two an encounter with a locomotive produced his fear of trains, and at age nine an incident with schoolyard bullies led to his reclusiveness, which grew into an intermittent fear of ranging far from his house. William's family had been well to do, but that fell apart during his childhood. They were not able to send him to college, but he received a scholarship to Boston University, then to Harvard where he studied under George Lyman Kittredge and William James. He studied at University of Göttingen in Germany, then earned a PhD at Columbia, writing his thesis on the influence of Byron on American literature. Despite the scholarships and successes, he suffered for his poverty all through school. Afterwards he worked in Philadelphia on material for an encyclopedia which was never published. In 1906 he was hired as an instructor in the English department at the UW. He later wrote his impressions of that earlier Madison: In September, 1906, I needed these quiet inland lakes and bluffs, these wooded shores, these long coulees and sunny oak-openings, and these west winds of Wisconsin as badly as any one who ever came.... But had I not needed them as a weary man, sick of nerves and spirit, my eye would still have drunk in the beauty of town and country-side with eager delight.... Almost from the first hours, Madison was to me the Peculiar City, a Capitol Dome on one hill, a University Dome on the other, and each Dome, as in no other city, mirrored in water.... Here was my ideal for the dwelling-place of modern man: an organic civilization in close touch with organic nature. A city far over whose roofs, twice a year, the wild geese fly. Why is not this the most famous city in our country, I thought. I will make it that, I thought. Longfellow's poem is but a conventional fancy, made to order in the studio. But let one live here, deeply and long, and he will write the poem that will give this city to America and the world. So I thought. And in the end so I tried to do. He fell in love with his landlord's daughter too. In 1909 he and Charlotte Freeman married. By then a few of William's works were already published: his Sonnets and Poems in 1906, a translation The Fragments of Empedocles in 1908, and The Poet of Galilee in 1909. The marriage ended when Freeman killed herself in 1911. Her family and some of Madison society blamed Leonard, and he had a nervous breakdown, retreating to a cottage at the edge of campus where his parents came to look after him.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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