Despite increasing attention to literary professionalism, the notion of the poetic career remains virtually unexplored. This dissertation traces a shift from the indeterminate career paths projected in poetic debuts of the 1920s to the postwar emergence of trajectories that evoke a steady progress. It locates the career in the context of the relationship between professionalism, which pressured poets to articulate orderly courses of development, and Romanticism, which privileged a path riddled with discontinuity and surprise. The tension between these conceptions of the career gave rise to the proliferation of first-book prizes for poetry and a corresponding surge in the tendency for poets to thematize beginning, a career strategy that projects a course of normative growth and at the same time presents the poet as an amateur. Chapter One argues that the modernist response to the rise of professionalism entailed a critique of the measured progress of the career. That the repudiation of the normative path is itself a career strategy reflects the contradictory ethos of the ideology of professionalism, in which authority derives both from standardized knowledge and from virtues that cannot be taught. If modern poets separated these imperatives in order to align themselves with Romanticism, postwar poets synthesized them to accommodate the culture of professionalism. Chapter Two describes describes how starting a career and winning a first book prize became inseparably linked, making it difficult for poets to reject the idea of career development, since that idea was often stamped on the path at its inception. Chapter Three illuminates how the consensus view of John Ashbery as an antiestablishment poet has obscured his engagement with the career. His obsession with the career goes hand in hand with his obsession with beginnings, and Some Trees demonstrates how his preoccupation with "the mooring of starting out" dominates his poetry from the start. Chapter Four argues that Louise Gluck's career is structured as a series of renewals that reflect both the difficulty of conducting a career and its instrumental role in the construction of poetic authority.