The camera only photographs the photographer, runs a line by John
Ciardi, perhaps his only good one. Or so my faulty memory recalls
it. Similarly, an anthology photographs the anthologist. The
Best American Poetry was edited this year by Adrienne Rich; to help
convey its contents, I must advert to the poet who chose them.

Back in 1951, I was one of three assistants in Archibald MacLeish’s
poetry course at Harvard, and a student named Adrienne Rich came to
me with an acrimonious complaint. W. H. Auden had just chosen her
Yale Younger Poet of the year, yet MacLeish was not paying special
attention to her. She had hoped for advanced, personalized
treatment, and here she was being denied privileged status. I tried
to remonstrate gently, but the Yale Younger Poet-elect indignantly
dropped the course.

Later that year, Miss Rich gave a poetry reading in Harvard Hall.
Knowing my skepticism about this reading, Dean Wilma Kerby-Miller of
Radcliffe, a charming woman, asked me as we were leaving for my
opinion. “To appreciate it fully,” I replied, “one would need the
combined attributes of a Homer and a Beethoven, namely blindness and
deafness.” Nothing about Miss Rich’s subsequent career has induced
me to change my position. In fact, I consider Randall Jarrell’s essay
that enshrined Miss Rich the great poetry critic’s sole blind (and
deaf) spot.

Miss Rich’s biography is as curious as her bibliography. After
Radcliffe, while still leading a heterosexual life, she married.
Her husband