By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.

The novelist Garth Greenwell was still an undergraduate when he took the poetry class that changed his life. Though he had been studying opera, the course affected him so profoundly that he decided, instead, to pursue a career in the literary arts. Since then, poetry—and, more broadly, the sound and rhythm and syntax of language—has been his obsession. “I’m a very unreligious person,” he told me. “But when I look at the weird shape my life has taken, it seems like the life of someone with a devotional temperament looking for an object of devotion.”

One writer in particular, the American poet Frank Bidart, made an impression on the young Greenwell, and has remained an especially potent source of inspiration. In a conversation for this series, Greenwell explained how a line from Bidart’s prose poem “Borges and I” illuminates the complex relationship between artists and the traditions that shape them. For Greenwell, being