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Though nominated for the Pulitzer Prize shortly before his untimely death in 1962, American poet Hyam Plutzik (1911-1962) remains unknown to the general public. This film, by Christine Choy and Ku-Ling Siegel , explores the fragility of memory and the durability of art and affection in a warm tribute to the author who spent most of his career on the English faculty of the University of Rochester.

Fellow poets Donald Hall (the US Poet Laureate), Galway Kinnell, Grace Schulman, Hayden Carruth, and the late Stanley Kunitz offer reminiscences of Plutzik's life as well as commentary on his work. The storyline is framed through the eyes of Tanya Plutzik, Hyam's widow, who has devoted her life to keeping her husband's legacy alive, and through reminiscences of their children.

The film traces Hyam Plutzik's growth as a poet from his youthful days on a Connecticut farm as the son of Russian emigrants, through his education at Trinity College and Yale, and finally as the first Jewish professor at the University of Rochester. Plutzik's Pulitzer Prize nomination came for Horatio, his long narrative poem that shows how elusive memory can be in searching for the true identity of Shakespeare's Hamlet. In similar fashion, this film juxtaposes memory, interviews, literature, and home movies to lead viewers on a journey through the life and legacy of a modernist whose voice resounds powerfully within the best formal and elegiac traditions of Theodore Roethke and Wallace Stevens.