Maureen N. McLane's My Poets
NYRB: "It was like no other critical study--was it a critical study? a memoir?--teeming with quotations, enlivened with unabashed schwarmerei. Though explicitly feminist, it was ecumenical: alongside Dickinson, Bishop, Stein, Moore, H.D., Louise Gluck, and Fanny Howe, McLane also showered affection on Chaucer, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and above all Percy Bysshe Shelley. Many of the chapters were titled with a poet's name preceded by 'my,' an allusion to two experimental books of prose by poets that became cult favorites of the 1980s: My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe and My Life by Lyn Hejinian."
"My Poets [...] was written not in a critical spirit but an urgently personal one, a tone of pedagogical contagion"
see also her new companion volume, My Poetics