Poetry

April is National Poetry Month. This always excites me, but I must say, poetry doesn't appeal to many of my friends or at least I'm not aware of it. In fact, one of my close friends with whom I taught Literature, doesn't like the genre at all and ranks poetry way down the list of items she enjoyed teaching - even below subject/ verb agreement and active voice. Yeats, Cummings,Tennyson, Browning, Eliot, etc.,and my main man Shakespeare- their words are magical to me, giving me inspiration and filling me with awe.I'll never forget the first time I read Christina Rosetti's poem "Goblin Market", so provocative and evocative. I couldn't wait to put it on my syllabus to teach.in fact, that poem inspired me to do a whole unit on women poets: Browning, Plath,Angelou, Dickinson,Mistral, Hahn,Nin, St. Vincent Millay and Rosetti, of course. If you haven't read some of these writers, do yourself a favor and luxuriate in their emotive words.Four other poets have influenced my thinking immensely: T.S. Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson (coincidentally I grew up on Tennyson Street )King David, and William Shakespeare. I relish reading Eliot's "Hollow Men", " Prufrock", "The Waste Land"( what a challenge); Tennyson's "Maud" and "Lady of Shallot"; David's psalms,and Shakespere's sonnets and "Venus and Adonis.My world has been the better for having these poets in it.