Carroll Terrell, UM scholar, dies Professor an Ezra Pound expert

BANGOR – Carroll Franklin “Terry” Terrell, a retired University of Maine English professor, was remembered Tuesday by friends and colleagues as a “buoyant” and “colorful” man. He died on Nov. 29 at Eastern Maine Medical Center at the age of 86.

Gail Sapiel, who worked with Terrell at Northern Lights press in Orono, which he founded, was his primary caregiver in the last years of his life. She said he was brought to the hospital for treatment of pneumonia and probably died of heart failure.

“He has a very colorful personality,” Sapiel said. “He was a great man, he really was.”

Terrell’s longtime friend Richard Hill, 83, of Orono said he made a big impression on everyone he met.

“Life around [Terrell] was one buoyancy after another,” said Hill, a professor of mechanical engineering at UMaine from 1946 to 1992. “Whatever the enterprise was, he’d be the center of it.”

Terrell came to live in Hill’s home in an adjoining apartment in the mid-1950s and stayed for several years. Hill said during that time, Terrell became part of the family, acting as a surrogate uncle to his children and always keeping conversations in the house thoughtful and full of life.

“He would always rise up on the balls of his feet and take off his glasses. Being around him was like constant theater,” Hill said.

Terrell taught in the English department at UMaine from 1948 to 1982 and stayed on part time until 1988. Of his many scholarly achievements, he is most noted for his studies of the works of American poet Ezra Pound. Terrell was the founder and managing editor of Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship, was a president of the Ezra Pound Society, and organized several major conferences on Pound and other modern poets that attracted poets and scholars from around the world.

In 1971 he founded the National Poetry Foundation, cited as one of 10 “Areas of Excellence” in the University of Maine System, which publishes books on modern poets.

Burt Hatlen, an English professor at UMaine, worked with Terrell at the National Poetry Foundation and eventually became its editor in 1988 when Terrell retired.

“He was always a kind of inventive and ground-breaking sort of scholar and teacher,” Hatlen said Tuesday. “He put the University of Maine on the map by making it a nationally recognized center for research on Ezra Pound poetry.”

Born in Richmond in 1917, Terrell received his bachelor’s degree from Bowdoin in 1940, his master’s degree from the University of Maine in 1950, and his doctoral degree from New York University in 1956, writing his dissertation on T.S. Eliot.

Terrell served in World War II from 1941 to 1945 as a captain in the U.S. Army.

A memoir by Terrell, “Growing Up Kennebec – A Downeast Boyhood,” was published in 1994 by Northern Lights.

A family service will be held at 1 p.m. today at Kincer Funeral Home in Richmond, followed by burial in Forest Hill Cemetery, Dresden, with military honors. A memorial celebration will be scheduled at the University of Maine Alumni Center at Orono. The family will communicate the specifics of that gathering at a later date.