Paul Mariani is University Professor of English emeritus at Boston College. He is the author of twenty books, including biographies of William Carlos Williams, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Wallace Stevens. His previous volumes of poetry include Epitaphs for the Journey, The Great Wheel, Salvage Operations, and Ordinary Time. He is also the author of Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius and The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity.