This small volume of selected poems by Jane Kenyon, in its battered, padded mailer, arrived looking like it had been lost, trampled in a snowbank, and chewed by a dog before landing at the right address.1 Then the book sat on my sofa table. “What are you going to make of this,” a friend asked, declaiming a few lines with all the tension of an old clothesline. And it’s true. I knew what Kenyon’s poems were like, knew that they were part of that plain-style free-verse tradition of the personal lyric that has dominated American poetry in the last fifty years and put me to sleep for twenty. My attitude was not unlike that of Sir Joshua Reynolds towards the masterpieces of Dutch painting. While traveling through Holland to look at paintings by Vermeer, Cuyp, and others, the English Grand Manner painter wrote condescendingly of their art as repetitive, dull, and “barren of entertainment” because of its lack of narrative and “poetical” quality, and because of its seemingly narrow focus on Dutch life—Dutch food and drink, Dutch landscape, Dutch interiors of Dutch households of Dutch rich and Dutch poor. With so many poets of the past and present to read and re-read, I’d never felt the need to engage with Kenyon’s poetry on its own terms.

The project of a book such as this one—the best work distilled like an attar from the collected poems of a beloved poet who died twenty-five years ago from