One of Maine’s most-respected literary figures was honored Sunday afternoon in a surprise celebration at the home of Maine Arts Commission Director Alden Wilson in Wiscasset.

Marion Kingston Stocking, who for nearly five decades edited the Beloit Poetry Journal, was received by Wilson, journal co-editors Lee Sharkey and John Rosenwald, Maine’s Poet Laureate Baron Wormser and others at the gathering in recognition of her long service to Maine literature and culture.

“She has been a clear, generous light for so many people connected with the arts,” Sharkey said of Stocking.

Stocking, now 83, came to Maine in 1984 after retiring from teaching at Beloit College in Beloit, Wis., where she had served on the editorial board of the Beloit Poetry Journal since 1955. She and her husband, David Stocking, brought the journal with them to their new home in Lamoine. David Stocking died in 1985, but Marion and the internationally known journal became fixtures on Maine’s literary scene.

In the 1980s and ’90s Stocking worked tirelessly for the Maine Arts Commission, according to Wilson, and was a principal driver of major positive changes in the commission’s approach to advancing the arts. She helped shape the commission’s Discovery Research Program, whose task was to inventory Maine’s cultural resources in various artistic and geographic communities. By helping artists, towns and regions survey and analyze their resources, the program helped to foster awareness of cultural life, and recently to promote their relationships to the “creative economy.”

“Marion was instrumental in bringing that program to life,” Wilson said. “She became the ambassador for the idea,” meeting with community arts groups and legislators, even tracking down one lawmaker while he was doing chores at the town dump.

Her efforts spurred “broad-based community and legislative support” for the program and the commission’s work, Wilson said.

Stocking had seasonal ties to Maine long before she moved here, and was an English instructor at UM when she was working toward a doctorate at Duke University in the late 1940s. In 1954 she joined the faculty of the English department at Beloit College, and soon afterward became a member of the editorial staff of the Beloit Poetry Journal, which she has guided from her headquarters in Wisconsin and then Maine ever since.

In Marion Stocking’s hands, the journal has helped support the writing of some of the best-known American poets of the postwar period, Sharkey said, including such diverse figures as Galway Kinnell, Charles Bukowski and Sherman Alexie, and Maine’s Kate Barnes, Theodore Enslin, May Sarton, Betsy Sholl and Baron Wormser.

Stocking brings “extraordinary scholarship and devotion” to her literary work, Sharkey said. “She’s one of the few [writers] practicing the belles lettres approach to reviewing,” which Sharkey said involves teaching people what, how and why to read.

“Marion knows in her bones that the more one gives, the more comes back to one,” Sharkey said, “and every aspect of her life reflects that generosity. It has sustained me among many others, and sustained the journal over its remarkable lifespan.”

By 2002, at the age of 80, Stocking turned over the main editorial duties of the journal to Sharkey and Beloit College professor John Rosenwald. The journal is now affiliated with the University of Maine at Farmington, and is going strong with a circulation of 1,350 copies shipped worldwide to France, Turkey, Australia, and also China where copies have made their way with Rosenwald on his assignments as a Fulbright scholar.

Sharkey said Stocking is now preparing a volume of her memoirs and a collection of her many reviews for publication.

No formal award was given to Stocking in Sunday afternoon’s event, but instead the gathering was a celebration of Stocking’s life, work and impact on Maine’s cultural life, Wilson said. And besides, he added, “she’s a delight to surprise.”

Many of Marion Stocking’s articles are archived on the Beloit Poetry Journal Web site at www.bpj.org, and Maine Arts Commission information is available at www.mainearts.com.