How does a poet repeatedly over a lifetime make art out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets - two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today - Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet's career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery.

David Lewis has argued against the thesis he calls "Desire as Belief", claiming it is incompatible with the fundamentals of evidential decision theory. I show that the argument is unsound, and demonstrate that a version of desire as belief is compatible with a version of causal decision theory.

Argues for the humean theory of motivation on the grounds that rejecting it requires rejecting decision theory.