Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xiii Introduction: The History of the Poetic Career 1 1 Apprentices to Chance Event: First Books of the 1920s 21 2 "Poets of the First Book, Writers of Promise": Beginning in the Era of the First-Book Prize 68 3 "Everything Has a Schedule": John Ashbery's Some Trees 104 4 From Firstborn to Vita Nova: Louise Gluck's Born-Again Professionalism 128 Conclusion: Making Introductions 154 Notes 169 Bibliography 191 Index 203

About the Author

Jesse Zuba is assistant professor of English at Delaware State University.

Reviews

"A fascinating story of poetic debuts. With nuanced understanding as well as clear-eyed realism, Jesse Zuba traces the self-fashioning that goes into the making of careers, allowing poets to strike a delicate balance between institutional demands and personal aspirations."—Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University

"The First Book combines social theory, cultural and publishing history, and close attention to individual poems to argue that notions of the poet's career, or the poet's profession, have shaped poems, books, and poetic oeuvres in the American twentieth century in ways that prior critics have not seen. Zuba's claims are true, new, and important."—Stephen Burt, Harvard University

"Exploring the professionalization of poetic culture over the last hundred years, The First Book represents a confluence of often mutually exclusive kinds of excellence: Zuba is at once an adept close reader of poems, a scrupulous literary historian, a curator of cultures popular and unpopular, and synthesizer of sophisticated critical thinking. Even more rarely, Zuba writes with a quietly stylistic panache that makes The First Book an uncommon pleasure to read."—James Longenbach, University of Rochester