National Poetry Month – All Things Good

Treasured Poems from a Treasured Volume

Jennifer and Katharine Rose Rose's Ridge April 26, 2017May 11, 2017famous poems, National Poetry Month, poetry 0 Comment

In the introduction to a treasured book of the past, A Treasury of the World’s Best Loved Poems (1961), readers are asked to ponder the question: “What is poetry?”

The introduction’s writer recalls the many and varied attempts at definition throughout the ages, citing poetry as:

“the music of the soul” (Voltaire)
“the art of uniting pleasure with truth” (Samuel Johnson)
“the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself” (William Hazlitt)
that which “makes me feel as if the top of my head were taken off” (Emily Dickinson)
“not the assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us” (T.S. Eliot)
Or as Albert Einstein said of truth, perhaps great poetry is “that which stands the test of experience.”

Digging Deep in the Garden of Poetry

Jennifer Rose Realms Of Gold April 30, 2015May 28, 2017A Light in the Attic Shel Silverstein, Baby Ate a Microchip poem, Caroline Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy Poems to Learn by Heart, Constantine P. Cavafy poems, Day, Don't quit poem, Emily Dickinson poems, I’m nobody! Who are you? poem, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, John Masefield poems, lfred Lord Tennyson Ulysses, Life Emily Dickinson poem, Marge Percy To Be Of Use poem, Memorizing poetry, National Poetry Month, Neal Levin poems, Old Age and Night poem, Poetry collections, Put Something In Shel Silverstein poem, Reciting poetry, She walks in beauty Caroline Kennedy, Shel Silverstein poems, The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Walt Whitman poems, Where the sidewalk ends Shel Silverstein, Youth 2 Comments

T.S. Eliot once wrote in the opening line of his great poem, The Waste Land, that “April is the cruelest month.” How keenly and acutely we felt that cruelty this spring after such a long, hard winter.

On this last day of April, however, we prefer to enter Merry May on a warm, gentle note, “digging into” an assortment of poetry in celebration and recognition of April as the official “National Month of Poetry.” Read more