No large research project—certainly none I could undertake—could bear fruit without the help and forbearance of many people; those thanked here are only some of them.
First of all I thank Mary Jarrell for the many kinds of help she has made available, in letters, in person and over the phone, and additionally through her published writings. Without her assistance this book could not exist. Having spent month after month in and around the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, I owe much to it and to its staff, and especially to Stephen Crook. I am also indebted to the staff and resources of other manuscript collections: to the Library of Congress, to the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, to the Beinecke Library and the Yale Review manuscript files at Yale, to the Houghton Library at Harvard, and to Kate Donahue and the University of Minnesota.
Langdon Hammer advised the dissertation from which this book hatched and offered as much help as any student could wish. Jennifer Crewe, my editor at Columbia, provided important support and advice, as did Columbia’s two anonymous readers. My student Hannah Brooks-Motl proofread the whole work at a late stage, fixed glitches, and removed a truly startling number of semicolons. I am also grateful for comments, readings, advice, and assistance from Tim Alborn, Leslie Brisman, John Burt, David Bromwich, Suzanne Ferguson, Richard Flynn, Nick Halpern, John Hollander, James Longenbach, Jenn Lewin, Stuart McDougal, Thomas Otten, John Plotz, David Quint, Thomas Travisano, and especially Helen Vendler. The stubborn mistakes that remain are of course my own.
Parts of this book have appeared in journals and anthologies, sometimes in earlier versions. About half of chapter 1 appeared in Metre, and much of the other half in the anthology Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, and Co. (University of Tennessee). Much smaller portions of chapters 1 and 2 saw print in Poetry Review and Yale Review. Part of chapter 4 appeared in PN Review. Manuscripts uncovered in the course of my work have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Thumbscrew, and the Yale Review. I am grateful to the relevant editors: Justin Quinn and David Wheatley; Suzanne Ferguson; Peter Forbes; J. D. McClatchy; Michael Schmidt; Robert Silvers; and Tim Kendall.
Without my parents, Jeffrey and Sandra Burt, none of this would be possible. Personal, and intellectual, help and happiness came from far too many people to list: some of the most important have been Jordan Ellenberg, Sara Marcus, Mike Scharf, and Monica Youn. Finally, this project—along with everything else in my life—has been improved beyond measure by Jessica Bennett, who sees how things are and knows how they ought to be; her understanding of art, proportion, and intimacy has, I hope, improved my own.