IN THE FORTY YEARS since Brooks and Warren published Understanding Poetry, explication de texte has become somewhat unfashionable, with “close reading” now being left, for the most part, to the undergraduates and to those who create multiple-choice questions for college entrance examinations. Still, as Marianne Moore observed in her poem on poetry (“I, too, dislike it”), “we do not admire what we cannot understand,” and I therefore find it refreshing to see that, among the articles accepted by the Editorial Board for this issue of PMLA, we have no fewer than three close readings of single poems—Neruda's “Galope muerto,” Keats's “To Autumn,” and a sonnet by Wordsworth. The poems are reprinted in their entirety in this issue, so readers will have no need to mix memory with desire.