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1 Introduction: Last Looks, Last Books
2 Looking at the Worst: Wallace Stevens’s The Rock
3 The Contest of Melodrama and Restraint: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel
4 Images of Subtraction: Robert Lowell’s Day by Day
5 Caught and Freed: Elizabeth Bishop and Geography III
6 Self-Portraits While Dying: James Merrill and A Scattering of Salts