THE IDEA FOR “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” came to me one after-noon circa 1980 in the course of a wonderfully argumentative conversation with two young men—brilliant, witty, and charming—I had just met at the Los Angeles home of the poet Charles Wright—Paul Monette and Roger Horwitz, both of whom were to die of AIDS, Roger in 1986 (after a long, painful illness, commemorated in Paul’s harrowing memoir Borrowed Time) and Paul in 1995. But in 1980, no one had yet heard of AIDS, and Paul and Roger had more joie de vivre than anyone I knew. Roger had received a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard with a dissertation on the French writer Henri Thomas, but had then taken the law school route so as to be able to make his options more flexible. As for Paul, he had gone to Yale, published a book of poems written very much under the sign of James Merrill and Richard Howard, taught briefly at a prep school outside Boston, turned to writing novels free-lance and, after the success of Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll, had come to Hollywood under contract as a writer for Universal Studios. On the afternoon in question, we got involved in a discussion of poetry, and Paul declared that he loved Stevens but found Williams “trivial” and had never really “gotten into” Pound.“You must have studied with Harold Bloom,” I said. Paul was taken aback and wondered how I knew. I told him that everything he was saying about Stevens’ greatness vis-à-vis that of Pound or Williams was straight Bloomtalk. Or Bloom cum Hillis Miller cum Geoffrey Hartman—all at Yale at the time and all convinced that Stevens was the great modern American poet. For Paul, Stevens was the rightful heir of Keats and Shelley (his favorite poets) whereas Pound was some sort of esoteric crank, whose Cantos were dismissed by most Yale professors (the great bibliographer Donald Gallup notwithstanding) as incoherent. Indeed, the irony was that the Pound papers were right there at the Beinecke Library, but that no one at Yale itself seemed to be interested.