Based on research into Teddy Roosevelt's early life and his first marriage, to Boston beauty Alice Lee, If a Poem Could Live and Breathe makes vivid what many historians believe to be the pivotal years that made Teddy Roosevelt into the man of action that defined his political life, and cemented his legend.If you've read the Edmund Morris biographies or David McCullogh's Mornings on Horseback, you know that when Roosevelt's wife Alice died just two days after having their daughter (also named Alice), he was inconsolable, to the point of rarely seeing his daughter and giving her in care to his own sister. But Teddy's courtship-and conquest-of Alice when he was a Harvard student is much less explored, and her own personality and appeal little known.In If a Poem Could Live and Breathe, TR turns from the rough rider who could spend days in the Badlands on horseback into a warm, hopeful suitor, from a president back into a man.