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cultural grid, which had its main power source buried beneath the mountains around Monticello. So I asked her: Why Jefferson?
    That question provoked a spirited exchange of letters over several months. Part of Jefferson’s poetic appeal, it turned out, was his lifelong concern with language. He had also been the subject of several distinguished poets of the past; Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and Robert Penn Warren had taken him on. But mostly, Mary Jo explained, “poets are seized by images,” and in Jefferson’s case two specific incidents struck her as poetic occasions: The first was his death on July 4, 1826, fifty years to the day after the acceptance of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress and the same day John Adams died; the second was another eerie coincidence—his purchase of a thermometer on July 4, 1776, and his recording a peak temperature of seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit that special day. These were “poignant and eminently visual events,” she explained, that captured a poet’s imagination. They were the kinds of historical facts that poets usually were required to invent. Whether it was a certain knack or sheer fate, Jefferson’s life possessed the stuff of poetry. 7
    The thirty-page poem that Mary Jo eventually produced, entitled “The Hand of Thomas Jefferson,” was a meditation on the hand that wrote the Declaration of Independence, was broken in Paris during a romantic frolic with Maria Cosway, then crafted those elegiac last letters to Adams and finally reached across the ages to pull us toward him. When I asked what about Jefferson pulled
her,
Mary Jo said it was his “accessible mysteriousness,” the fact that there appeared to be a seductive bundle of personae or selves inside Jefferson that did not talk to one another but could and did talk to us. This was a bit different from Peterson’s “protean” Jefferson, which suggested a multidimensional Renaissance Man. Mary Jo’s Jefferson was more like Postmodern Man, a series of disjointed identities that beckoned to our contemporary sense of incoherence and that could be made whole only in our imagination, the place where poets live. 8
    I was not sure where that left historians, who were not, to be sure, obliged to disavow the use of their imaginations but were duty-bound to keep them on a tight tether tied to the available evidence. Watching Mary Jo work made me wonder whether Jefferson’s enigmatic character might not require the imaginative leeway provided by fiction or poetry to leap across those interior gaps of silence for which he was so famous. Did that mean that any historian who took on Jefferson needed to apply for a poetic license? It was absolutely clear to me that the apparently bottomless and unconditional love for Jefferson at the grass roots level was virtually impervious to historical argument or evidence. It even seemed possible that the quest for the historical Jefferson, like the quest for the historical Jesus, was an inherently futile exercise. No less a source than Merrill Peterson, the best Jefferson biographer alive, seemed to endorse such doubts when he made what he called the “mortifying confession” that after over thirty years of work, “Jefferson remains for me, finally, an impenetrable man.” 9
    Anyone who paused too long to contemplate the wisdom of the quest was likely to be trampled by the crowds, who harbored no doubts. Upwards of six hundred thousand Jefferson lovers were attracted to a major exhibit on “The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello,” which ran from April to December 1993. Susan Stein, Monticello’s curator of art, had made a heroic effort to reassemble most of the furnishings that had been dispersed starting in 1827, when Jefferson’s crushing debts forced his descendants to auction off the estate. The result was a faithful replication of what Monticello’s interior spaces actually looked like during Jefferson’s lifetime. If the rooms of the mansion were