Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet

“Blazing high style" is how The New York Times describes the prose of Christian Wiman, the young editor who transformed Poetry, the country's oldest literary magazine.

Ambition and Survival is a collection of stirring personal essays and critical prose on a wide range of subjects: reading Milton in Guatemala, recalling violent episodes of his youth, and traveling in Africa with his eccentric father, as well as a series of penetrating essays on writers as diverse as Thomas Hardy and Janet Lew...