It has been well-documented that good college professors are increasingly rare. As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, I once called Paul Cantor, one such professor, at about 1 o’clock in the morning with a stylistic question about an essay I was writing for National Review Online. I emailed him beforehand to see if he was awake. He was, of course — watching a boxing bout from the Sixties. “I’ll be up for another hour or so,” he told me. “Boxers don’t fight like this anymore.”
Known to many as perhaps the greatest Shakespeare scholar of our time and a giant of American literary criticism, Paul Cantor passed away at the age of 76 on February 25. Cantor once wrote of the late Harold Bloom that “rarely does a literary critic display the kind of genius and creativity characteristic of the famous authors he analyzes.” He applied it to Bloom, but I apply it to him. Paul Cantor, as I encountered him, was a sage of intellectual creativity who found beauty in the humblest parts of our culture. He saw Lord Macbeth in Vince Gilligan’s Walter White, The End of History in the Worldwide Wrestling Federation, and Alexis de Tocqueville in South Park. Not only did Cantor expertly assess the intellectual creativity of his analyzed authors; he also embodied a creativity all his own, examining culture with epistemophilic zeal until the final days of his life.
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