Open AccessA SOURCE OF INSPIRATION
Author(s) -
Neil Baldwin
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
rbm
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2150-668X
pISSN - 1529-6407
DOI - 10.5860/rbm.1.1.172
Subject(s) - passion , shadow (psychology) , poetry , art history , focus (optics) , spring (device) , history , art , literature , classics , psychology , psychoanalysis , engineering , mechanical engineering , physics , optics , psychotherapist
It was the turbulent spring of 1970. My second semester as a graduate teaching fellow at SUNY/Buffalo was drawing to a close, and it was time to start thinking about the focus for my oral qualifying examination. Beyond that, an even more terrifying prospect loomed before me like a ghostly, 300-page shadow, what to choose as my Ph.D. dissertation topic¿̣I remember stopping timidly into the offices of various English Department eminences grises—Leslie Fiedler, Marcus Klein, Robert Creeley—and speaking with them about my newly kindled passion for modern poetry. In those heady days just after the untimely death of Charles . . .