Few American poets have had such auspicious beginnings as Brad Leithauser. His first collection of poems, Hundreds of Fireflies: Poems (1982), was greeted with resounding critical acclaim. Not since Robert Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle (1946) had a first book by an American poet met with such widespread and immediate success. Major reviews of the book appeared in The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and Time. Leithauser became known as one of the leading New Formalist poets, and in two important critical essays published in The New Criterion, he argued against the pitfalls of "metrical illiteracy" and suggested that free-verse poets had exhausted nonmetrical poetry.

Leithauser, born on 27 February 1953 in Detroit, Michigan, is the son of Harold Edward Leithauser (a lawyer) and Gladys Garner Leithauser (a children's writer and college professor). Leithauser, a 1975 graduate of Harvard University, went on to earn a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1980. After...