THE PARTICIPANTS:

David Barber's book of poems, The Spirit Level, was awarded the Terrance Des Pres Award from TriQuarterly Books in 1995. He is a staff editor at The Atlantic Monthly.

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University. He has written more than twenty books, including The Western Canon, The Book of J, The Anxiety of Influence and, most recently, Shakespeare: The Invention of The Human. A MacArthur Prize fellow, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999.

Stephen Burt is completing a dissertation on Randall Jarrell at Yale. His essays and reviews appear in the TLS, The Boston Review, The Yale Review, Southwest Review and elsewhere. His book of poems, Popular Music, was published last year.

Frank Kermode is the author of many books, including The Sense of an Ending, The Genesis of Secrecy and The Art of Telling. A coeditor of the Oxford Anthology of English Literature and the Oxford Book of Letters, he holds an honorary fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, and is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature.

Richard Lamb is the associate editor of The New Leader and reviews for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Book Review and Slate. His poems have been published in The Paris Review and Western Humanities Review.

William Logan is the author of five volumes of poetry, Sad-faced Men, Difficulty, Sullen Weedy Lakes, Vain Empires and Night Battle. He is also the author of two books of essays and reviews, All the Rage, in the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series, and Reputations of the Tongue, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. He has received the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. He teaches at the University of Florida, where he is the Alumni/ae Professor of English.

Daniel Mendelsohn's essays and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Lingua Franca and The New York Review of Books. In addition, he is a regular book reviewer for The New York Times Book Review and The New York Observer. A lecturer in classics at Princeton, he is currently a visiting member of the faculty in literature and humanities at Columbia University. His first book, The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity, was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. He is at work on a translation of the complete works of C.P. Cavafy.

Richard Poirier's latest book is Trying It Out in America. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University and a former editor of Partisan Review. He is the editor of Raritan Quarterly, which he founded in 1981, and chairman of the Library of America. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and lives in New York City.

Helen Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard. She has written books on Yeats, Herbert, Keats, Stevens, Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney. She also reviews contemporary poetry for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic and The London Review of Books.