The Perfect Life: Lyric Essays (Tupelo Press's Life in Art) - Softcover

Poet and essayist Peter Stitt describes not a perfect life achieved, but his search for that unattainable ideal, writing of books he has loved and the often difficult lives of writers, including his teachers John Berryman and James Wright along with his lifelong literary companions Frost, Stevens, Austen, Dickinson, and Poe. Generous and alert in his fascinations, Stitt explores a quest for freedom among the Amish, the French partisans, and the "heretical" Cathars; considers divine interest in college basketball; and offers a fresh perspective on parenting, meditating on the life of an adopted stepdaughter.

Peter Stitt is the founding and ongoing editor of The Gettysburg Review and the author of two books on American poetry, The World's Hieroglyphic Beauty (Georgia, 1987), cited by The New York Times Book Review as a notable book of the year; and Uncertainty and Plenitude (Iowa, 1997). He is a professor of English at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.