Hirsch's collection of poems The Night Parade (1989) is more autobiographical in its themes than Wild Gratitude, and it explores the elements of Hirsch's childhood alluded to in "Omen."

"The Cave of Making" (1965), by W. H. Auden, is a poem about writing and an elegy for Auden's friend Louis MacNeice. Another classic elegy by Auden, who influenced Hirsch's writings and who is quoted in the epigraph to Wild Gratitude, is "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" (1939).

Hirsch's scholarly but readable prose work How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (1999) contains a variety of compelling poems and suggestions on how to approach them.

Steven Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943—1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright: A Novel (1972) is a vivid and delightful tale of a boy describing his relationship with a childhood friend who...