1 Robert Lowell’s obituary of Robert Frost, New York Review of Books, 1 February 1963.
2 Catullus, Poem 50.
3 Catullus, Poem 44.
4 Poems once inserted at 19–20 are believed to be spurious, and are therefore omitted. Also omitted is the fragment attributed to Catullus once inserted at 18.
5 Thank you to Claire Jamset and Hugo Williams for their helpful suggestions on the translated poems.
6 In an interview in 1961 with Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, transcribed in Jeffrey Meyers, Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs (University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 1988) p. 38.
7 Keats’ Hyperion is lengthy in itself, but Frost read aloud just the opening, in which much is expressed in little space.
8 Prologue to Callimachus’ Aetia, Fragment 1.28.
9 Thank you to Giles and Alexandra Milton for discussions about the kiss poems.
10 See Nisbet, R. G. M., and S. Harrison (eds), Collected Papers on Latin Literature (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 411.
11 Robert Frost, in a unpublished lecture of 1947; and Selected Letters, p. 248, cited in Tim Kendall, The Art of Robert Frost (New Haven, London, Yale University Press, 2012) p. 324.
12 Throughout, I consult principally Kenneth Quinn’s Latin text and commentary, with an eye also on the Oxford classical text of R. A. B. Mynors.
13 I have positioned this poem here as ‘58b’, as it appears to have originated as part of Poem 55.