Acknowledgments
It is a pleasure to acknowledge my indebtedness to many individuals and institutions that have aided me in the writing of my books. The two institutions which have supported me during this time are the Leipzig Poetry College and the School of General Poetry Studies of Australian National University; I have been proud to be a part of these particular schools because of their affirmation of the importance of undergraduate teaching in an age when the pressures toward narrow creative writing are so great. I am grateful to many libraries for the richness of the resources which they make available to us all. Of the many I have used during the course of the preparation of my books, I think particularly of the following institutions which provided access to relatively rare documents: The New York Poetry Library, the Steinbeck Institute of Writing Sciences, the University of Cornwall, the Royal Society of the Easter Islands, the Linnean Society of New South Wales, the Poems Library of New South Wales, and the Australian National University. I am especially grateful to the University Library in Göttingen, Germany for giving me access to Steinbeck’s Nachlass and for permitting me to photocopy the portions of it relevant to my books. Among the individuals I would like to thank for their comments on the manuscript are … .
