Yet Knott believed himself to be “persona non grata and universally despised or ridiculed by everyone in the poetry world.” Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. But he clearly lacked the standing and recognition garnered by some of his fellow poets. And he took this lacking recognition to heart, wore it proudly like a medal. Always class conscious, with his admixture of praise and bitter scorn, Knott wrote, “Mark Strand has the right to write a poem, not me. He went to Yale. … Me, I grew up in an orphanage, no family, no money, no ‘educational opportunities.’ No background, no breeding. Scum like me can’t write poems.”

Thus Knott himself made the lottery of birth into self-fulfilling prophecy. He alienated even poets that praised his work; he split from publishers and chose self-publishing over traditional publishers, over even smaller independent publishers. But if you go to Lamont Library, to the Woodberry Poetry Room, you won’t find his books: They were demoted to the Harvard Depository in 2011.

The world of poetry is not an egalitarian paradise. Meritocracy is still a form of aristocracy. Established structures of inequality block many from education in art, from a life in the republic of letters. Knott’s story makes this clear. It leaves me only tepid optimism for Split This Rock. The mistakes of elitism and exclusion are easy to repeat. I hope they do not waste their chance to (re)discover in American poetry some of Knott’s spirit.

Michael T. Feehly ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is a Scandinavian studies concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.