Early in 1983, Sacvan Bercovitch asked me, and I agreed, to write a contribution of some reasonable length (200 manuscript pages) on modern American poetry for the new Cambridge History of American Literature. That contribution, too many years in the making, has grown to twice its stipulated length and narrowed drastically in focus, from “modern American poetry” to my “modernist quartet”: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. I have learned some things in the process; one of the most important is that my taste is hopelessly canonical. And for this taste of mine I offer no apologies. I regret only not being able to write with seriousness about two other American poets whom I like almost as much as my quartet: Marianne Moore and Hart Crane. The reasons I have not written about those two are obscure to me. The fault may lie with insufficient love.