Osherow, who lived, worked and wrote in the hills outside Florence from 1981 to 1983, says that it takes about 10 years for a writer to develop a poetic voice and produce a volume of poetry.

After college, Osherow says she continually submitted poetry to various journals and contest committees, and more often than not found a rejection slip in her mail.

"It's a long, grueling process, and each time you [enter a contest], it's a long shot," she says. "And each time you feel slightly foolish spending the money on the Xerox and the stamp."

Zarin, a staff writer for The New Yorker, agrees that writing poetry is a long and difficult process that is often unrewarding for the artist. "Poetry is not a career choice," she says. "It certainly wouldn't be a very wise one."

But members of the new generation say that writing has been less a choice than a necessity for them. Like their predecessors, the new poets see poetry as a way to express--and get through--life's tragedies.

"Lowell called writing verse a way of getting on with life, no matter how painful it was," says Lowell Professor of the Humanities William Alfred, a friend of the late poet. "[Writing] was their health, it was not their sickness. I think the writing was their balance wheel."

"They took life's chances....It's a very daring thing to tell the whole truth about what it's like to be alive," he adds.

Eileen Simpson, Berryman's wife, agrees that the older generation of literary artists used their writing to help them survive their many difficult experiences. In her book, Poets in Their Youth, she writes that for her husband, "the only thing was to write poetry. All else was wasted time."

While the latest crop of poets to be produced by Harvard has yet to meet the standard of greatness set by their teachers, these writers, too, have been driven by the need to write.

And literary experts say that the constant influence that one generation exerts on another, even as individual poets come and go, is a positive part of the creative cycle.

In his book, The Burden of the Past, Porter University Professor Emeritus W.J. Bate '39 writes: "In this dilemma, the arts mirror the greatest single cultural problem we face, assuming that we physically survive: that is, how to use the heritage, when we know and admire so much about it, how to grow by means of it, how to acquire our own 'identities,' how to be ourselves."