Myriad-minded: to those who knew S. Foster Damon as a friend and colleague, that felicitous Coleridgean adjective best describes a man whose kaleidoscopic talents and interests--William Blake, cooking, Punch and Judy, fencing, book collecting, square dancing, the occult--made him one of the most remarkable individuals in academy for half a century. But if any one pursuit may be singled out as most illustrative of the man and his mind, it would probably be his writing poetry. By the end of the 1920s, Damon had so established himself with two slim volumes of verse that he was widely regarded as one of the most promising young poets in the United States. Although his poetic reputation diminished somewhat after 1930, he continued to write, and in 1964 he produced, under the pseudonym Samuel Nomad, what Malcolm Cowley has aptly termed Damon's epitaph: Nightmare Cemetery, a remarkable sonnet sequence which continues to be...