I loved this book!  A very quirky collection of lectures (given every 6 months over 15 years to a group of graduate students) by a poet, literary critic, and essayist.  Rich in literary allusions and wonderful quotations, Ruefle dives deep into the poet’s craft, mind, soul, and heart and surfaces with some extraordinarily clever and insightful comments, e.g. a poem is never finished, it’s abandoned by its writer.  From Keats to the French Symbolists, Mellarme and Valery, from Emily Dickinson to Emily Bronte, from Cy Twombly to Billy Collins, this book is an ‘allusionists’ dream.  The chapter on Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World is perhaps my favorite piece of writing in quite a while filled with insight, pithy phrases, and CONNECTIONS.  Using Sebald’s Rings of Saturn (in my pile of ‘to be read’) as a jumping off point, she says that “…for the imaginative reader, there can be discoveries, connections between books, that explode the day and one’s heart and the long years that have led to the moment”.   She describes reading as “a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single life span to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again, to watch the great personal psyche spar with it, to suffer affliction and weakness and injury, to die and watch those you love die, until the very dizziness of it all becomes a source of compassion for ourselves, and for the language which we alone created, without which the letter that slipped under the door could never have been written or, once in a thousand lives—is that too much to ask?— retrieved, and read.  Did I mention Supreme Joy.”   This is a book to be re-read again and again.