And then this man did an extraordinary thing, and it has some importance in my life really. He spent the entire class period reading aloud my poems to the brightest kids in the school, and saying sarcastic things about them, just sarcasm, mere sarcasm. He also told the class - we did not know each other's grades - and he told the class that I was flunking. And these guys were all taking special math classes, special physics classes... they were the generally bright people. And, at the beginning, as he'd read aloud a poem, he'd say something to dismiss it, they would laugh, and then they stopped laughing, it was just so extreme. I think it was 50 minutes, and he didn't do anything else but read through these sort of 20 pages of single space of poems, and ridicule. And he did say from time to time that he knew what it was like to want to be a poet, he'd wanted to be one too, and Hall was flunking because he was spending all his time on this nonsense. And we were gonna... he was doing this to shake it out of me, that's all. And I felt like tears in the class, but I didn't cry and these... the other students simply became very silent. They were bright kids, but they were adolescent males at a prep school - they were not compassionate sorts, but as I left the room, two or three of them sort of touched me on the shoulder, or something... it was amazing. I got back to my room and howled with tears of rage, and swore that I would work harder on my poems than I had ever worked before. I don't know that I did, but I had... I had the motive of revenge going for me. And the story goes on, oddly enough, not forever, but it's... I think it's worth telling. I grad... I recovered, I learnt how to study. I began to get my B's. I... I got admitted to Harvard. I began to publish poems quite a bit. Then I began to publish professionally, and I published my first book of poems when I was 27, and Exeter invited me back to give a poetry reading to the students. And, fine... I remember driving into the town feeling the old terror coming over me, as I went back into the town, but of course I was glad to be asked and so on, and when I arrived, I discovered to my astonishment and some horror that they had has asked Chilson Hathaway Leonard to introduce me that night. Nobody knew what he had done except the other students in that class. I had been uncharacteristically silent about it. I hadn't talked about it to my parents, to my best friend. It was just so horrible, I shut up about it. I thought about it all the time, but... so people didn't know. What they did know was that he had come into the, you know, English coffee room grumbling about my terrible poems when I was a student, and then, whenever something turned up in The New Yorker or The Atlantic [sic] or something, they would tease him about it, so it was something whereby they... they teased their friend, whom they were a bit irritated with in general anyway. And they thought it was funny. And my book came out, my first book came out and got a lot of praise and then they asked me up to read so they teasingly got him to introduce me. Well, you know, I thought of getting up there and telling the story. I thought briefly... public revenge is always revolting and so I didn't do it... I just said thank you and read my poems and so on. A few years later - this story has one more episode - a few years later I was writing a piece for The New York Times Sunday Book Review about a poem by Wordsworth - the daffodils poem that everybody knows - in which I have a sort of unusual interpretation - I won't go into it, it's kind of fresh of me, but I think actually it's pretty valid, and talk about the relationship of... of daffodils and daydreams to gold and investment, and so on. And at the end of the piece, I knew people would... some people who love that poem would hate my reading, and I said, well anybody who thinks this disturbs his reading of the poem, never really cared about the poem anyway they just remembered some postcard that an English teacher handed around in a classroom. Well, I had no recollection. I thought I was making up this scornful thing, and I got a postcard of daffodils in the lake country, put inside an envelope, and Chilson Hathaway Leonard had written on the back of it, I suppose your fingerprints are still on it. Incredible. I still don't remember that he handed it around, but it would seem too extreme a coincidence. I believe I was taking unconscious revenge, and as long as revenge is unconscious, you can forgive yourself.
