twenty-fifth poem

P.S.: Do you in constructing your books generally have that idea of coherence in mind?

Wright: Every time. Did I mention to you Robert Frost's remark — it is a very Horatian remark — that if you have a book of twenty-four poems, the book itself should be the twenty-fifth? And I have tried that every time, every time.

—James Wright, interview with Peter Stitt, James Wright: A Profile (Logbridge-Rhodes, Inc., 1988) edited by Frank Graziano and Peter Stitt.

three names

I may interpolate here that there has been a strong implication by gentlemen reviewers that there is something intrinsically humorous and definitive, in the worst sense, about the three-name woman poet. And indeed, a great number of the triple-threat ladies have been very, very bad. If, however, the poetic stature of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, or William Butler Yeats, for example, has been pegged to the number of their employed names, I have not observed it.

—Josephine Jacobsen, "From Anne to Marianne", Two Lectures (Library of Congress pamphlet, 1973)