Not first sight, often enough, but a second look - it is a mysterious thing with poetry that it finds its own moment. The poets that have meant most to me - Lowell, Bishop, Schuyler - all, as it were, were rudely kept waiting by me. I had their books, or I already knew some poems of theirs, but there was no spark of transference. Then it happened, and our tepid prehistory was, quite literally, forgotten beyond a lingering embarrassment at my own callow unresponsiveness. It was as though they had always been with me, and I found it difficult, conversely, to remember our first encounter. It is a slight relief to me that James Schuyler, who writes about reading almost as much as he writes about seeing, confesses to a similar sluggishness of feeling:

Twenty-some years ago, I read Graham Stuart Thomas's
'Colour in the Winter Garden'. I didn't plant
a winter garden, but the book led on to his
rose books: 'The Old Shrub Roses', 'Shrub Roses
of Today', and the one about climbers and ramblers.

('Horse-Chestnut Trees and Roses')

LRB 7 February 2002 | PDF Download