Justice’s insights serve as a sort of de facto taxonomy, an organically designed system that he uses to present his lecture on each respective aspect of the evolution of poetic form. There is no formal thesis here, but rather a kind of scrapbook that has a broader motive. The material possesses no hidden secrets; the treasures lie in plain sight and simply need be discerned to open the artist’s mind to their possibilities.

DONALD JUSTICE delighted in the constraint of poetic form and the subtleties of meter. A student of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Karl Shapiro at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Justice’s students at Iowa, and later at the University of Florida, included Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, James Tate, and Rita Dove. Justice was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was offered the position of poet laureate, declining only because of ill health. He received the Lamont Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize.