Rachel Hadas, a poet, translator, essayist, critic, and professor of literature, grew up in an environment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan contiguous to Columbia University and connected with the generation of New York intellectuals that largely dominated the American literary and political scene from the 1930s through the 1960s and continues to be influential three decades hence. Yet Hadas experienced an unusual journey from Radcliffe and Harvard in the 1960s to her emergence in the 1980s, with five published books of poetry (some mixed with prose), as perhaps the most prolific poet among the New Formalists--a categorization about which she has expressed, like most of the poets connected with the movement, a decided ambivalence in essays in both the Kenyon Review and AWP Chronicle. Instead of proceeding directly to graduate school to study either classics or creative writing, Hadas spent much of her twenties married to...