Twenty Questions

In Twenty Questions, one of America's finest poet-critics leads readers into the mysteries of poetry: how it draws on our lives, and how it leads us back into them. In a series of linked essays progressing from the autobiographical to the critical - and closing with a remarkable translation of Horace's Ars Poetica unavailable elsewhere - J. D. McClatchy's latest book offers an intimate and illuminating look into the poetic mind. McClatchy begins with a portrait of his development as a poet, and provides vibrant details about some of those who helped shape his sensibility - from Anne Sexton in her final days, to Harold Bloom, his enigmatic teacher at Yale, to James Merrill, a wise and witty mentor. All of these glimpses into McClatchy's personal history enhance our understanding of a coming of age from ingenuous reader to accomplished poet-critic. Later sections range through poetry past and present - from Emily Dickinson to Seamus Heaney and W. S. Merwin - with incisive criticism generously interspersed with vivid anecdotes about McClatchy's encounters with other poets' lives and work. A critical unpacking of Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Miss Blount," for instance, is interwoven with a compassionate psychological portrait of a brilliant poet plagued by both romantic longings and debilitating physical deformities. There are surprising takes on the literary imagination as well: a look at Elizabeth Bishop through her letters, and a tribute to the Broadway lyrics of Stephen Sondheim.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.