“I came to consciousness quite late,” he says, pushing aside his empty açai bowl and cradling his fourth coffee of the day, which he takes as strong as possible, sometimes travelling with his own beans. After graduating from Washington and Lee, he began what he considers his real education as a poet, reading for even more hours a day than Samuel Johnson thought necessary, swallowing all of Blake, Dickinson, Dante, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes. He moved forty times in the next fifteen years, taking work as a tennis pro, a telemarketer, a groundskeeper, and an oil-field construction hand; he travelled around Europe and Central America for long spells. In his first collection of prose, “Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet,” from 2004, he describes heading to Guatemala with a small bag and a single book, “The Complete Poems of John Milton.” “I thought a writer needed a store of EXPERIENCE, and I was reading Milton because I thought that the only way to write GREAT POEMS, which is all I wanted to do, was to come to terms with the GREAT POEMS of the past,” he writes. “I haven’t altogether outgrown those ideas and impulses, though I am less inclined now to go around in my daily life talking in capital letters.”

Part of what Wiman was doing in those days was looking for a form, not only for his art but also for his experiences of existential arrest and excess. Having left the Church, he tried to find meaning in literature, kicking the tires of aesthetic theories like those of Matthew Arnold and Wallace Stevens, test-driving the possibility that poetry could fill the void left by religion. But his poems, when they were good, seemed to come not from his conscious mind, exactly, but from some perfect sound he felt as if he had overheard, some indeterminably inward or outward voice, which he did everything he could to capture. In another essay, written before his return to Christianity, he explains, “There are even moments, always when writing a poem, always when I am suspended between what feels like real imaginative rapture and being absolutely lost, that I experience something akin to faith, though I have no idea what that faith is for.”

By the time that “Ambition and Survival” was published, Wiman had become reasonably well known, although less as a poet than as an editor. In 1992, he’d won a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, at Stanford, which led to a job as a lecturer in poetry there. That was followed by similar positions at Lynchburg College and at Northwestern, which is where he was teaching when, one night over dinner, Joe Parisi, then the editor of Poetry, asked Wiman if he wanted his job. The pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly had recently left the magazine a startling gift of some two hundred million dollars, and Parisi was scrambling to replace himself as editor-in-chief so that he could lead the foundation established to manage the bequest. Wiman had written for Poetry, which is based in Chicago, and received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship in 1994, but he was shocked when Parisi asked him to take over. After a few months of meetings, the magazine’s board members narrowly voted to approve his appointment.

Lilly’s bequest was big enough to impress the hayseeds at the feed store, but, as the magazine’s editor, Wiman was making only sixty thousand dollars a year. He laughed as he told me that he arrived at Poetry a mostly unknown entity, in 2003, but had managed to annoy almost everyone by the time he left, in 2013. Like family feuds, squabbles among poets are too tedious to recount, but Wiman remembers being accused of commissioning too much prose, of privileging formalism over free verse, and of publishing vicious reviews and vacuous poetry.

Much of the fuss came down to the fact that, of the more than a hundred thousand poems submitted every year, the magazine prints only around three hundred. Wiman riled many of the submitters by seeming to imply, in an editorial, that Poetry should be printing even fewer. “I think a strong case can be made that the more respect you have for poetry, the less of it you will find adequate to your taste and needs,” he wrote, explaining that, in his view, “institutionalized efforts at actually encouraging the over-consumption of poetry always seem a bit freakish, ill-conceived, and peculiarly American, like those mythic truck stops where anyone who can eat his own weight in rump roast doesn’t have to pay for it.”

For help reading all the submissions, Wiman hired Chapman, who came highly recommended by the faculty at the University of Virginia, where she’d done an M.F.A. in poetry. When Chapman took the job, she was dating someone else, but, within a few weeks, the two editors began to realize how regularly and deliberately they were running into each other outside the office. Both of them describe one such accidentally-on-purpose meeting, at a Barnes & Noble, as the day they realized that, in Chapman’s words, they “shared a language no one else could understand.” Wiman hoped she would be there—she was, reading “Macbeth,” as it happened—and he decided that buying her a copy of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” sufficed as an excuse to engineer an encounter. They left the bookstore and went for a walk, and she found herself telling him things about her life that she had never shared with anyone before.

Chapman had spent her childhood moving between her mother’s house, in Woodbridge, Virginia, and her father’s ancestral home, in Fairfield, Tennessee. She was raised partly by her grandfather, a former commandant of the United States Marine Corps, after her father drowned in a scuba-diving accident in Okinawa. Both her parents were in the ocean when the undertow of a distant earthquake caught them; Chapman, then two years old, was sitting with a babysitter on the beach, and watched as only her mother returned to shore. In a new memoir, “Holler: A Poet Among Patriots,” Chapman recounts how her mother’s repeated lament from that tragedy was, in essence, the first poem she ever memorized. “The Baptist hymns from childhood came back to me,” her mother told her, over and over again. “I felt your father’s hand slip out of my grip and knew he was gone; I thought I wanted to die, too. But then the hymns came back to me, filled my limbs with light, and made me tread again. God told me I had to live to take care of you.”

Chapman’s own spiritual awakening came when she was twenty-one, living in Manhattan after finishing an undergraduate degree at New York University. A series of religious images appeared, and something ineffable took hold of her, language and light bursting both around and within her, as if it were the Holy Spirit itself. “My religious consciousness and my poetic consciousness are fused,” she said, “because not only was this an encounter with God but it was the first line of poetry that ever came as an inspiration, instead of having to gin it up.”