Harold Bloom in The Critical Flame:
I first met Alvin Feinman in September 1951, the day before I encountered another remarkable young man who also became a life-long friend, Angus Fletcher. Alvin was twenty-two, a year older than we were, and a graduate student in philosophy at Yale, where Angus and I were students of literature. Alvin, to my lasting sorrow, died in 2008. Of my closest friends I am fortunate still to have Angus, having lost Alvin, Archie Ammons, and John Hollander, three superb poets and majestic intellects.
I am no poet; I cannot forget. Many of my friends are or were poets: Mark Strand, a recent loss; Robert Penn Warren, and happily still with us, William Merwin, John Ashbery, Jay Wright; and younger figures: Rosanna Warren, Henri Cole, Martha Serpas, Peter Cole.
Alvin at twenty-two was already a poet of astonishing individuation: the emergence of voice in him clarified as rapidly as it had in Rimbaud and Hart Crane.
More here.
