And so what I'd do is I… I composed a poem where you get two lines from the… from Spinoza, two lines from the combat instructor, two lines from Spinoza, two lines… back and forth, and I must say that's… that’s one of the poems from that first book that I… I still feel, you know, I still like and that people mention to me most often, and then the poems about… about my daughter. And those… I went on writing those for about, it must be two and a half… yeah, it is two and a half years because there are 10 poems and one… there‘s one for each season of that. And everybody thought that was awful, to do that. You weren't supposed to write about things of that sort, about your private life, and so you keep your private life private; whereas you know, poets always wrote up till TS Eliot's time, people… that's what you wrote about, what you… what you were really concerned about, what you cared about, and I thought you know, some… I was very much moved by Mahler's Kindertotenlieder — Songs for the Death of Children —, and I thought well, you know, we don't lose our kids through… through early disease the way they… everybody did then. We lose them through divorce. And… so, I decided to write poems about that and I had great trouble publishing those poems or… or getting them any notice.

I remember once I was at the… I went to the University of Rochester for a poetry conference and I was going to read a paper about how I wrote one of those poems and… and what things that had happened to me and how that related to what I put in the poem, and they said, 'Oh you mustn't, you… you mustn't read that, you know, you just can't…' besides which I was a professor and professors aren't supposed to have any private life. And so, maybe… in a sense they aren't supposed to have any life. You know, you are supposed to live as a pure spirit or something of that sort. And… well anyway, but those were the poems I think which first got me notice, the ones about my daughter, and Louis Untermeyer liked them very much and… and he gave me the Pulitzer Prize for them. It cost him his job as judge of the… of the Pulitzer Prizes.