SOURCE: Fenton, James. “On The Frontier.” New York Review of Books 43 (February 29, 1996): 52-3.

In the following essay, poet Fenton lauds Doty for learning from Lowell and Cavafy that an experience is made representative through devotion to the particular.

On January 15 this year, Valerie Eliot presented the third annual T. S. Eliot Prize to the American poet Mark Doty for his collection My Alexandria. The previous two winners, Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon, were from Northern Ireland, and many a British poet will be wondering when his turn will come. The fact is that several London literary prizes have an international definition of their scope of contestant. The Booker Prize for fiction defines its “community” as being any English-language novelist except the Americans. This may sound unfair but is probably practical. It also reflects, coincidentally, a legal definition found in literary contracts, which often include all the major English-speaking...