When my first child Andrew was six months old, in early autumn of 1954, we moved to Cambridge where I started three years in Harvard’s Society of Fellows. The Junior Fellowship provided free time: to read, to write, to do whatever I liked except to teach or to undertake formal study. That September, when my wife went back to school to finish her degree, I put my best time into caring for Andrew from 8:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. six days a week. Oddly enough, I’m not sure that the Senior Fellows who elected us would have disapproved of my first year’s project: Junior Fellows were known for following their own noses, for spending three years doing something unexpected. I was elected to write poems—and largely wrote them—but one of my friends, who was a philosopher of aesthetics, spent three years learning to play the piano, then became a philosopher of jurisprudence. Another Junior Fellow devoted most of his energy to being psychoanalyzed. For my first year, I was housefather during the liveliest hours of my day. My wife started Andrew’s breakfast and I finished cleaning up by scraping oatmeal from the kitchen ceiling; then I fed him a bottle, gave him his bath, played with him, put him down for a morning nap, made him lunch and another bottle—before my wife, who spent mornings in class and the library, came home and relieved me for the afternoon.

My point, as usual, is work. Afternoons, while my wife strolled Andrew through the streets of Cambridge, I concentrated attention on the page, but even in the morning I worked a little without actually neglecting my baby son. I learned how to feed him a bottle with my left hand crooked around his head that leaned on my left shoulder, to leave my right hand free for a paperback. During baths I played T. S. Eliot on the phonograph. During playpen moments, I sat beside Andrew with a pad and a ballpoint pen, working on lines—some of which were about babies. Once a week, Adrienne Rich came to the apartment for a three hour visit during baby-care. She was pregnant with her first child, and although we talked poetry most of the time, we did not talk only poetry. Like anyone awaiting a first child, Adrienne was nervous about the fragility of an infant, and about the nurturing tasks ahead of her. Twenty-five years later, when so much had happened in our lives, Adrienne and I talked about gender politics in the 1950s; I claimed I wasn’t nearly so bad as I might have been. “Don,” Adrienne reminded me, “you taught me how to bathe a baby.”

In Ann Arbor when I was teaching school, I kept an island of work intact for poetry, separate from teaching, by working on poems each morning from six to eight. For two early hours I grubbed happily at words, before I allowed myself to think of term papers and troubled students. Andrew at three and four years old was an early riser and wanted to play with his father. If I told him to go back to his room and amuse himself, I hurt his feelings; so I invented a scheme: Every morning I wrote him a poem on a subject he assigned. When he requested a poem about “Books,” I obliged him: