In 1963 poet Theodore Roethke died of a heart attack. Two days later, critic Richard Blackmur died after a long bout with Buerger's disease. In the same year, poet and critic Randall Jarrell was instantly killed when a car hit him. And in 1966 poet Delmore Schwartz died of a heart attack.

"I'm cross with God who has wrecked this generation/First he seized Ted, then Richard, Randall, and now Delmore," wrote poet John Berryman of the deaths of his peers.

But six years later, Berryman himself jumped into the frozen waters of the Mississippi River and died.

Given the tragedy which marked most of these poets' brief lives, it is hard to imagine them as role models. But for the latest generation of Harvard poets--who have started their writing careers in the past decade--those prominent writers from the 1940s to the '60s have provided them with a sense of from and style which they say was invaluable to their artistic development.

Some of the leading lights of that older group--Schwartz, Berryman, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop--brought their poetry to Cambridge, and they in turn inspired a new school of Harvard-trained poets.

While these new poets have their own unique styles, they share the common experience of studying at Harvard under teachers such as Robert Fitzgerald, Lowell and Bishop. And these poets also say they grew up with the legacy of writers like Berryman and Schwartz, who did not survive long enough to teach the new generation.

Harvard's newest writers, most of whom are anthologized in Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, agree that the teachings of these celebrated artists had a tremendous influence on their growth as poets.

For example, Fitzgerald's famous class in versification was instrumental in giving the young poets a grounding in form and structure, says Judith Baumel '77.

Baumel, Wayne Koestenbaum '80, Jacqueline F. Osherow '78 and Cynthia Zarin '81 were among the 12 artists invited by Penelope Laurans, Fitzgerald's widow, to participate last year in a reading of the works of those who had studied under her late husband.

Although members of the newest generation say they could not avoid feeling that they were part of a grand tradition of Harvard poets when they studied here, the prominence of their teachers often put them at a distance in the classroom.

"I was in awe of Lowell and intimidated by Bishop," recalls Osherow.

"One would be intensely aware of the presence of poets at Harvard," says Laurans, who currently teaches a similar course on versification at Yale. "I would think it very difficult to be a young poet at Harvard without that sense of history. And that may be daunting, but you also might think that if they did it, so can you."

But the younger poets eventually overcame their fears and became successful writers, inside and out of the classroom.

Many of them say they were launched into the real world of publishing from the editorial boards of The Harvard Advocate and Padan Aram, where Zarin says she sometimes found it even harder to get her work published than she has outside of Harvard.

Even with college experience, however, the publication of a volume of poetry--a key stage in a poet's career and a step which signifies a poet's maturity--does not come quickly after graduation, the new poets say.