In 1975 I took a course at Harvard from Elizabeth Bishop. Her general popularity at that moment can be measured by the size of her class; enrollment totaled five students. Although Bishop had won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, she was considered a “poet’s poet,” a writer treasured by fellow artists but not much noted by critics, and hardly known at all by the common reader. Today Bishop’s reputation stands as high as that of any American poet of the last forty years. She is perhaps the only major poet of her generation on whom academic critics and non-specialists can enthusiastically agree. But back then a coterie sustained her modest succès d’estime.

Today Donald Justice occupies a similar position in American poetry. He is our most notable “poet’s poet,” with all the ambiguities that bittersweet honorific implies. He has won most of the major awards—the Lamont, the Pulitzer, the Bollingen. His work appears in all the anthologies edited by poets, but it remains conspicuously absent in most of those compiled by professors. He is widely regarded as the most influential poetry-writing teacher now alive. His former students from Iowa, Syracuse, Gainesville, and Bread Loaf constitute a Who’s Whoof American poetry. They include writers in every aesthetic camp. Since his didactic emphasis has been on craft, concentration, and precision, he has founded no school of poetry. Consequently, his work has attracted almost no attention from academic critics. Yet he is one of the few