It's possible that, with the exception of Robert Louis Stevenson (), Robert Service (), and Edgar Allen Poe (), most poetry is wasted on the young.
Oh, I read my Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron in college, and learned that beauty is truth, truth beauty was all I needed to know. has the Ancient Mariner and Daffodils, and they are very nice.
But you need some life behind you before you begin to really love poetry.
Walt Whitman in gave me permission to contradict myself, among other things, and Robert Frost taught me more about fences and birches and the quiet of winter woods in than I had known before.
e.e. cummings () sent me upso floating many bells down and Robert Hunter borrowed his four lean hounds for Franklin's Tower:
In franklins tower the four winds sleep
Like four lean hounds the lighthouse keep
Hunter is a poet you can dance to:
And there were the April poems that I began to make a habit of reading every spring:
The Prologue to Chaucer's : "Whan that aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of march hath perced to the roote" rolls off the tongue like spoken music.
The stanzas of T.S. Eliot's left little dances of words in my head.
"April is the cruellest month, breeding.
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing.
Memory and desire, stirring.
Dull roots with spring rain."
"Those are pearls that were his eyes." Eliot borrowed it from Shakespeare. I borrowed it for one of my own:
The Ensnaring Glances of Men
Their faces line the fence posts with
Their brown beards waving in the wind and
Laughing eyes that call me from the road
(And singing, singing...)
The heads that laughed on London Bridge and
Grinned on pikes from ear to ear
Could not have touched me more.
(Oh, good Christ, they sing! Their voices!)
But there lie lies. I catch their eyes
In mine and, wrapped in spider wire
I lie now torn again, and cold.
(The song? The singing boom of loving?)
"Those are pearls that were his eyes"
Or nails now rusted in their holes
And staring still enraptured at the clouds
(The wind blows cool and whistles, singing...)
My legs I find embracing only fence posts
Wrapped in summer grass and leaning back
Inert against the sun.
The dust lies still.
It moves not.
Neither does it rise.