in the Wall Street Journal, wrote: “Rapture and Melancholy... provides an occasion to revisit not just Millay's improbable life but also her sometimes revelatory work. . . . While the diary entries vary widely in interest level, Epstein’s biographical summations are reliably fascinating and informative. . . . " In an interview with Mara Meisel of the Pittsburgh Press in 1984 Epstein said: "I always had confidence that poetry was the most important thing in my life…No great poet has not had an extraordinary command of the language, all of history and the manners and morals of his age. How are you going to say something that's going to be significant to people if you aren't well-grounded in history and in a broad sense of human nature?" In April of 2022 the poet received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters degree from Kenyon College. Personal life In 1976 he was married to Wendy Roberts. They had two children, Johanna Ruth Epstein and Benjamin Robert Epstein. They were divorced in 1993. Epstein married Jennifer Bishop in 1993, and they had two sons, Theodore John and Nathaniel David Epstein. Epstein and Bishop were divorced in 2012. Since the early 1970s Epstein has been an active member of B'nai Israel Synagogue in Baltimore. Books No Vacancies In Hell (poetry) Liveright/Norton, 1973 The Follies (poetry) Overlook/Viking Press, 1977 Young Men's Gold (poetry) Overlook/Viking Press, 1978 The Book of Fortune (poetry) Overlook/Viking Press, 1982 Star of Wonder (stories and essays) Overlook/Viking 1986 Spirits (poetry) Overlook/Viking 1987 Love's Compass (essays) Addison-Wesley, 1989 Sister Aimee: the Life of Aimee Semple McPherson, Harcourt Brace, 1993 The Trinummus of Plautus (translation) Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994 The Boy in the Well (poetry) Overlook/Viking, 1995 The Bacchae of Euripides (translation) University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997 Nat King Cole (biography) Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999 What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay Holt, 2001 The Traveler's Calendar (poetry) Overlook/Penguin Putnam, 2002 Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington, Random House, 2004 The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, Ballantine/Random House, 2004 Literary Genius: 25 Classic Writers Who Define English & American Literature, Paul Dry Books, 2007 (Illustrated by Barry Moser) The Glass House: New Poems, LSU Press, 2009 Lincoln's Men: The President and His Private Secretaries, Harper Collins, 2009 The Ballad of Bob Dylan, Harper, 2011 Dawn to Twilight: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University