Bryant’s use of verse may not be wholly surprising if one recalls his youthful forays into hip-hop. In 2000, when he was 21, he released a song titled “K.O.B.E.” that featured such lines as: “I don’t know, yo, these women come and go. Like the wind they blow. How do I know it’s you for sure?”

At the same time, Bryant’s literary track record has been mixed. When Phil Jackson was the coach of the Lakers, he bought books every season for the team’s players. Bryant received several over the years — like “The White Boy Shuffle” by Paul Beatty and “Montana 1948” by Larry Watson — but he and Jackson often joked that they were left unread.

Don Share, the editor of Poetry magazine, said he would advise Bryant to read two works. The first was “New Addresses,” a book of poetry by Kenneth Koch that contains a series of epistolary poems, similar to Bryant’s, like “To Piano Lessons” and “To Jewishness.” The other was “The Victory Odes” of the ancient Greek poet Pindar, which Share called “the most famous poems of athleticism in Western culture.” He thought Bryant could be inspired.

Many poets were struck by how purely Bryant’s obsessive personality came through in his poem. Twemlow said Bryant’s poem reminded him and his wife, also a poet, of “Whoso List to Hunt,” a famous 16th-century sonnet by Thomas Wyatt. In it, a deer hunt serves as a metaphor for a helpless pursuit of a woman.

“I would tell him, ‘Look at how, in 14 lines, this guy managed to condense this feeling of incredible obsession — and not only a recognition of it, but a recognition that he can no longer pursue it,’ ” Twemlow said.