I am grateful to all those at the National Gallery of Art who honored me by the invitation to give the Mellon Lectures of 2007 and by their personal kindness to me during the period of the lectures: Earl A. Powell III, Director of the Gallery; Elizabeth Cropper, Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts; Therese O’Malley, Associate Dean of CASVA; David Brown; and Andrew Drabkin. I enjoyed very much not only the presentation of the lectures but also the social occasions surrounding them, as well as the seminar with the Fellows of CASVA.
As I wrote these lectures, I profited from month-long residencies at the National Humanities Center (the Assad Meymandi Residency) and the American Academy of Berlin. I thank Dr. Meymandi; Geoffrey Harpham, Director of the National Humanities Center; Kent Mullikin, Executive Director of the Humanities Center; and Gary Smith, Executive Director of the American Academy of Berlin for their generous welcome. I was aided in writing these lectures not only by my compensation as Mellon Lecturer but also by research funds from the Department of English at Harvard (the Hyder Rollins Fund) and from my research fund as a University Professor.
I thank Steven Yenser of UCLA for our conversation about James Merrill’s difficult poem, “The Instilling.”
I am indebted to Kristin Lambert, my assistant, for continued help in preparing the final manuscript, and to Hanne Winarsky of Princeton University Press for helping this book into print. I also thank Ellen Foos and Dalia Geffen at Princeton.