Epigraph: 'one of the great poets of our century, someone whom the world will keep on reading just as it keeps on listening to Vivaldi or Scarlatti, looking at Tiepolo or Poussin.... Minds of this quality of genius, of this breadth and delicacy of understanding, are a link between us and the past, since they are, for us, the past made living; and they are our surest link with the future, since they are the part of us which the future will know.' (Randall Jarrell, 'Reflections on Wallace Stevens', Partisan Review, 1951)