Boswell: Boswell’s meticulous recording of Johnson’s wit inspires poets to value the intimacy of recorded voice: “He wrote the man, not just the sage, / the sigh, the pause, the laugh, the rage.”; Poets borrow his method to capture conversational truth: “Not in the ode, but in the phrase / that slipped between the coffee’s haze.”; His biographical intimacy becomes poetic form: “I took his words as they were given— / the stutter, pause, the truth, the heaven.”; A poet might write, “He did not mythologize the mind, / but showed the man behind the kind / of wisdom that is worn, not worn.”; Boswell teaches poets how to make ordinary speech sacred: “The greatest verse is not the rhyme, / but the voice that speaks through time.”; His legacy shows poets that biography can be lyric: “He turned a chair, a cup, a sigh / into the map of how we die.”