“La Fontaine” and “The Lives of the Poets” both invite us to consider the role of other texts in the composition of poetry. Bruce Boone and Robert Gluck frame their collection as a series of “transitions” of the poetry of Jean de La Fontaine; Steve Abbott takes his title from a famous 18th century book of biographical essays on English poets, and uses text from all kinds of biographical sources–books about famous people, celebrities, canonical writers, etc.–to construct his own essay-poem
