Many years ago, in a poetry class for beginners, I read one of my early efforts which contained the following three lines: "A young poet drops his pen, astonished / by the twenty lines he has just written, / certain it is the Poem of Total Realization." The teacher smiled and said, "I remember thinking I had written that poem when I was sixteen." What we learn from writing poems over a long expanse of time is that each one takes further along the...