Clausen was born on April 2, 1923, in
Coquille, Oregon. He was educated at the
University of Washington, from which he received his
Bachelor of Arts degree with
majors in English and Latin in 1945, and at the
University of Chicago, which awarded him a
PhD in classics in 1948. His doctoral thesis was on the grammatical writings of the ninth-century bishop . After taking a post as an instructor in classics at
Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1948, Clausen was promoted to
associate professor in 1955. In 1959, he moved to
Harvard University as a full professor of Greek and Latin, where he remained for the following thirty-four years. He became the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Greek and Latin in 1982, the Pope Professor of Language and Literature in 1988, and a professor of comparative literature (concurrently with his classical posts) in 1984. Between 1966 and 1971, he was chair of the Harvard classics department. Clausen held a fellowship at the
American Academy in Rome for the 1952–1953 academic year, and a fellowship of the
American Council of Learned Societies for 1962–1963. In 1963, he was made a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a
visiting professor at
University College London in 1971, and held the 1982
Sather Professorship of Classical Literature at
University of California, Berkeley; He was also made a
fellow commoner, an honorary appointment, of
Peterhouse, Cambridge. The Virgilian scholar
Stephen Harrison wrote that Clausen's 1964 article "An Interpretation of the
Aeneid" was a foundational text of the movement. In that article, Clausen described the
Aeneid as the story of "a long
Pyrrhic victory of the human spirit", and wrote that the poem's ending , with "no sense of triumph", shows the
Aeneid to be neither a work of propaganda or a "sentimental" poem which resolves its conflicts at the end. He was married twice; to Corinna (), whom he married on August 20, 1947, and to Margaret (née Woodman), whom he married on June 19, 1970. == Published works ==