Some of the student-poets at Harvard include (from left) Benjamin Paloff '99, Sara Grillo '00 (lying down), Brian Phillips '99, and Caroline Whitbeck '00-01. Photo by Rose Lincoln.

Why did I write? what sin to me unknown

Dipped me in ink, my parents' or my own?

-Alexander Pope

Whether nature, nurture, or the will of the gods is the crucial factor in their calling, the basic ingredient seems to be a special relationship to language.

Others may use language competently, even spectacularly, but essentially as a tool, a means for making an argument or telling a story.

But these few, the poets, are captivated by language itself, its sound, its structure, the dizzying variety of its combinations. For them, it is more than a tool. It is, in the most exalted sense of the word, their toy, endlessly fascinating, irresistibly compelling.

And while poets have never been and probably never will be in the majority at Harvard (or anywhere else for that matter) they constitute an inevitable and self-selected cohort, one with deep roots and a robust if elusive infrastructure.

"Harvard has produced some extraordinary poets. There's a reservoir of tradition here that is continually renewed and reinforced," said Peter Sacks, professor of English and American literature and language, whose poetry workshop provides many undergraduate poets with a forum in which to hone their craft.

Sacks, who came to Harvard in 1996, is one of a long succession of poet-professors who have nurtured undergraduate talent. Among his predecessors have been Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Seamus Heaney. Next fall, Forrest Gander and Pulitzer Prize-winner Jorie Graham are scheduled to join the faculty.

The collection of recordings in the Woodberry Poetry Room in Lamont Library, curated by Stratis Haviaras, preserves the voices of these and many other poets reading their own works.

Many Harvard undergraduates have gone on to achieve fame as poets, including Edward Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Richard Wilbur, Robert Bly, John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Frank O'Hara, and Harold Brodkey.

All of them have published poems in the Harvard Advocate, America's oldest continuously published college literary magazine, founded in 1866.

The Advocate's current poetry editor is junior Caroline Whitbeck. A classics concentrator from New York City, Whitbeck often finds herself thinking about her distinguished predecessors.

"The great names that have been associated with the Advocate make you examine yourself. I sometimes wonder, would they want me to be carrying on their tradition?"

Despite keeping an eye on the past, Whitbeck has a style of her own. Dark-haired with magenta nail polish and a silver ring through one nostril, she speaks with tightly wound energy of her relationship with words.

"I tend to live in words. I feel that when you get the words exactly right, they have the capacity to affect you physically."

Finding that magic formula can be a daunting task, and Whitbeck speaks of often feeling like "a lump of frustration." But she believes that "if you have enough energy and you press on something hard enough," a poet can sometimes give expression to the inexpressible.

Relationships constitute the raw material of most of her work, which she says is "blatantly confessional. My main drive is to tell stories that people can identify with."

She speaks with fondness of her work on the Advocate's poetry board, which meets twice a week to review the hundreds of submissions that pour into the magazine's offices.

She also values the competition involved in working with other talented, highly motivated writers.

"It's like when you have running races in the fourth grade. You wouldn't run your hardest if you weren't racing against someone else who was fast."

But competition aside, Whitbeck knows that her relationship with words, her drive to express the inexpressible, comes from deep within.

"I know what I do, and I know I have to do it. I don't have mission statements. I'm running on instinct."

Senior Brian Phillips' hometown of Ponca City, Okla., couldn't be further from Whitbeck's city that never sleeps, but the disparity in origins only shows that the poetic imperative can strike anywhere.

"In Oklahoma, poetry is not taught with much zeal," Phillips said. "In fact, I was the only person I knew who was interested in it."

Asked what it was like to be a poet in Ponca City, Phillips replied, "I wasn't a poet in Ponca City. I was a poet in my room."

Phillips' first poetic influences were the English Romantics -- Byron, Keats, and Shelley. The encounter, at age 15, was fortuitous.

"It was exactly the right emotional moment for me to be blown away by them."

The Romantics spurred him to compose poetry that he now describes as "stylized and corny." This phase ended when he came to Harvard and took a course with Helen Vendler, the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor.

"She turned me on to Seamus Heaney's poetry, and I just devoured it. Then in my sophomore year I got into one of his workshops. By that time, he was a mythical figure to me. The high point of the term was when I went out for a beer with him. Actually, he had a beer and I had mineral water. I was only 20 at the time."

Most recently Phillips has been reading the work of Jorie Graham, whom he encountered as a guest lecturer in Sacks' poetry workshop. But this time he is struggling more consciously against slavish imitation.

"You have to guard against going wholly into a new territory because it's already occupied by the person who showed it to you."

For Sara Grillo, who grew up in Lynnfield, Mass., poetry was never a secret, solitary activity. Her father, a computer consultant, often wrote poems to his children on special occasions, showing them how verse could capture the nuances of human emotion. His daughter has carried on the tradition.

"I like to pick up some positive aspect of a person and rejoice in it," she said.

A junior concentrating in English, Grillo composes most of her poems in her head, writing them down only when they have taken on finished form. "I think poetry is a manifestation of being in touch with your emotions, of being able to express them in a coherent manner," she said

She describes herself as very sound-oriented, a dancer who listens to the radio constantly and usually composes to a beat. The rap music of Queen Latifah and Wu Tang Clan are important influences, along with the work of Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Pablo Neruda, and Langston Hughes.

Currently putting in 20 hours a week as an intern at Fidelity Investments, Grillo plans to enter the corporate world after she graduates, and is considering a career as a lawyer or a money manager. The choice hardly seems to go with her love of rap music, her ambition to write the first musical about child abuse, or the cowry shell choker she wears around her neck. But the incongruity does not seem to bother her.

"Human beings are complex," she said, "especially me."

For senior Benjamin Paloff, music has also been an important influence. Before he was born, his father ran a jazz club in Atlantic City, N.J., and Paloff grew up hearing not only recordings of Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington, but personal anecdotes of the musicians themselves.

Poetry, however, was a different matter. Paloff remembers hating the work of T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson when he first encountered them in high school, but an inspired teacher named Peter Murphy was able to open his eyes to the beauty of their work, and to encourage Paloff's own first writing attempts.

Paloff has since gravitated toward the work of Slavic writers, concentrating in Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard. A key moment for him was when he heard poet Derek Walcott read his translation of a poem by Russian-born poet Joseph Brodsky. "It was absolutely flooring," he said.

For Paloff, the essence of poetry is often encapsulated in these brief nuggets of experience. While in Poland as a researcher for Let's Go travel guides he journeyed to the small fishing village on the Baltic where Copernicus lived. The experience recalled to him a statue of Copernicus in Philadelphia inscribed with the Latin words, "He who stopped the sun and moved the earth."

"Copernicus has been hugely influential in my consciousness," Paloff said, "because he represents the idea of a simple utterance that suddenly turns things upside down, but in a way that makes it seem necessary, like a missing piece of the puzzle."

The unique backgrounds and experiences that students bring to their poetry is one of the delights of working with them, Sacks said.

"What's interesting to me is that many of these students have been influenced by sources that I'm not familiar with."

As a teacher he also finds it gratifying to see these diverse creative minds come together over the course of the term, to react with sympathy and understanding to each other's work, and to help each other express the ideas, feelings, and experiences that clamor for verbal form.

"It's an exciting process to see the changes that take place. There's a real camaraderie that sets in as people take each other's work in and get a sense of one another's evolution. They begin to realize that this is a very special vocation."