"BUT I absolutely can't understand Mr. Auden," says Jessica Todd, flirtatiously. She is speaking to Linton Wheeler, a much younger man, a student and himself a poet. They are in Jessica's bookstore, in a small university town: Hilton, in the middle South. She is seated behind her desk. Small and plump, with little shape, sad, not aging well, Jessica usually thinks of herself (she feels herself) in terms of defects (pores and sags), but today she is aware only of her eyes, which are large and dark brown. Even Tom, her husband, has said that they are beautiful. She and Linton are communicating through their eyes, hers to his wide-spaced hazel. Eyes and somewhat similar voices—both are from Virginia.

"Or Delmore Schwartz or T. S. Eliot either," says Jessica, lamentingly.

Serious Linton begins to explain. William Empson, Brooks, and Warren. He mentions Donne and the Metaphysicals. Jacobean drama. Pound?