@artkavanagh Thanks for this really interesting response. One thing Zuba talks about is how the idea of poetic career changed over time. At one point, prior to Marvell, the career was defined in terms of a movement through genre, with the writing of an epic being the culmination of the career. Over time, things changed—and here I am, I am sure, over-simplifying—as the idea of professionalism took shape in various ways, intersecting with ideas about manliness, the idea of what it meant to be a poet, to have a career as a poet, changed. As a poet with six books to my credit—three translations—and as someone who is absolutely outside “the profession” as it has come to be defined by the MFA and other institutions, I’m finding the book really interesting.