Robert Archambeau examines the influence of the poet and critic Yvor Winters on five poets who were among his final generation of graduate students at Stanford in the early 1960s: Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, James McMichael, John Matthias, and John Peck. Archambeau begins with the context of the modernist poetics Winters first espoused and then rejected. The story that follows-of how his five most prominent students accepted, rejected, or transformed Winters' poetics, and how these poets went on to greater or lesser degrees of success in the field of late-twentieth-century letters-illuminates the cultural politics of poetry in our own day. The author provides close readings of poems by this diverse group of poets, places their careers and works in the context of their times, and traces the relationship between American literary history and American canons of literary taste from the 1930s to the present day. Laureates and Heretics is an important contribution to American literary history and American poetry.