In his new essay "Rehearsals and Rehashings," poet and critic Craig Morgan Teicher considers how great poets like W. B. Yeats, Sylvia Plath, Robert Hayden, and Elizabeth Bishop return to questions and themes found in their early poems, in their late work.
"Sometimes the late poems attempt answers to the earlier poems' questions; other times they admit defeat and finally abandon the pursuit of an answer, or of answers in general,” Teicher writes.