When I published that book, it had a remarkable response, and a response that it did not deserve, and whenever that happens, then you get knocked down for it later.  It wasn't that good a book, but people were looking... the magazines... the magazines of criticism were looking for the new poet.  This was 1955, and seven years earlier they'd had Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, but they hadn't trumpeted anybody for a while.  And it came out, and oh, it won a prize, and it was listed for the National Book Award, which is ridiculous really, and it was reviewed in the Sunday Times Book Review, the Daily Times Book Review, the Sunday Herald Tribune Book Review, and... and daily, and every magazine. Many more magazines reviewed poetry at that time. There was much less poetry published, but much more was reviewed, and reviewed by more competent people - it's curious, there's been an enormous explosion of the numbers of titles over the last 50 years, and the numbers of books sold - certainly the numbers of people trying to be poets - but the amount of response, critical response has diminished.  The... the reason - this is just a little insert - why... why there would be so little response, but so much more sales, is the poetry reading.  That is how people find out now, that wasn't going on in 1955... very little.  And anyway, they'd had a tremendous amount of response, and the first wave of reviews in the daily's, and the weekly's and the monthly's was highly positive, and then about a year later the quarterly's hit in, and then - they were the old pros, you know - had had time to look at all this prose, and I began to take my lumps, and some of them were actually intelligent lumps, and they called me on things they were right to call me on, and I had... had me walking up and down a lot, thinking about my faults, and that was helpful.