Although Horace Gregory's .Collected Poems (1964) received the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1965 and he was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, these prestigious recognitions of his excellence did little to alter the politely appreciative but muted response to Gregory's work during his long and productive life. As poet, translator, biographer, editor, critic, and teacher, he was the essential man of letters. Everything about him was intensely literary. Reading his graceful, honest, vivid (and, again, somewhat neglected) autobiography, The House on Jefferson Street (1971), one becomes saturated in Gregory's reading life. A man who was happily married to another poet and who experienced life richly, Gregory always gave the impression that he filtered all experience, though finely, through his passion for poetry and through his passion for the life of the writer. Partly, this intense literariness, sometimes bordering on belletrisme, owed much to his childhood illness...