"Spectral Emanations," the extraordinarily brilliant and ambitious work in poetry and prose which leads off [the collection by the same title], is prompted in part by a passage, quoted in the volume's epigraph, in which Hilda of Hawthorne's The Marble Faun talks about the menorah, the golden lamp of seven branches…. Hilda proposes a parable in which the lamp will be recovered and its seven branches kindled, each with a different color, until the world is illumined by "the white light of truth."

"It will," she says, "be a seven-branched allegory, full of poetry, art, philosophy, and religion," and she goes on, in a passage not quoted by Hollander, to say that she will propose such a project—a project by which the imagination will create a poem in lieu of a lamp—to seven poets.

In effect, Hollander is these seven poets in one, and in "Spectral...