How much could be too much? If I own, say, 20 books by Ashbery, what would I lose by having only 17? Coolidge raises a similar dilemma. My answer, of course, is that one can never have enough, given world enough and rhyme. Diminishing returns? One would think that would be the case but it is not. It is true that I reach a point of saturation and back off from time to time. I might read intensely for a month or two, and lay off a poet for as long as five years. I cannot wish them to have written less.

I remember that it was in an Ashbery poem that I first came across the word "recondite." I looked it up in the dictionary. It was in the poem "Fragment" (from The Double Dream of Spring): "older / Permissiveness which dies in the / Falling back toward recondite ends." How appropriate that it is this word that I remember looking up. Who is more recondite than Ashbery?