An early victim of asthma, John Kevin Newman (Kevin to his friends) spent much of his childhood reading rather than playing outdoors. He took compulsory Latin in grammar school, and after hearing his master describe the basic structures of Greek, was permitted to take Greek in place of history. At Exeter College, Oxford, he developed a natural proficiency at Latin verse composition, rendering not only dactylic hexameter but elegiac and lyric measures with equal facility. One of the four awards for composition from the Consilium Latinitati Excolendae was given to him personally at the Vatican by Pope (now Saint) Paul VI. Following his four-year course for Literae Humaniores, he spent two years studying Russian and Old Slavonic. He taught sixth-form Greek and Latin for fourteen years, with emphasis, naturally, on composition. He began to publish in scholarly journals while still teaching at the Downside School in Somerset, England, and proudly published his Latin compositions in several volumes. He received his doctorate from Bristol when he was nearly 40 and published his dissertation as Augustus and the New Poetry, which formed the basis of his first monograph of the same title, and also his second, The Concept of the Vates in Augustan Poetry, essentially an expansion of the fourth chapter of the first. With extensive knowledge of the poetry and a broad reading of the scholarship, he championed the influence of Hellenistic poetry on Virgil at a time when Alexandrian influence was just beginning to be fully appreciated, though often to the exclusion of other influences and to the minimalization of Horace, Propertius, and Tibullus. Within two years he was installed in Urbana-Champaign as professor of classics and within a year of his appointment he had married Frances Stickney.
Over the course of his 31-year career at Illinois, his great professional love remained that of his dissertation: Virgil, the poets who influenced him and the poets of his era. With his wife Frances he took on the most difficult of Greek poets, Pindar, for studies focused on the komos-aspect of his encomiastic poetry. He continued to be called on by the Vatican for Latin contributions to its journal Latinitas. He always brought extensive learning not only of language, but of its context and subsequent influence. K.V. Gransden in Classical Review called Newman’s comprehensive work, The Classical Epic Tradition, “a rich, learned, informative, and continually rewarding book” and said that its author, “displays a polymathy unequalled in any anglo-saxon classicist since Bowra.”
Kevin Newman died at age 91 on July 26, 2020.