About the Poetry Archive...

At the beginning of each week, a new “Poem of the Week” is selected, and last week’s poem is moved into the archive. Only great poetry appears here... which leads to the question:

What IS Great Poetry?

How does one choose when going about the business of making a collection of “great” poems?

There have been many attempts at a definition of poetry. Poetry is “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), “the record of the best and happiest moments of the best minds” (Shelley). It is that which “makes my body so cold no fire can warm me,” and makes me “feel as if the top of my head were taken off” (Emily Dickinson). “Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits . . . a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanation” (Carl Sandburg). It is “not the assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us” (T. S. Eliot).

‘‘The poet is the rock of defense for human nature’’ (William Wordsworth); he “brings the whole soul of man into activity” (Coleridge); he “has a fixed focus which all the talk and all the staring of the world has been unable to fix before him” (Archibald MacLeish). Louis Untermeyer gave us, perhaps, the most eloquent definition: “Poetry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable.” English poet A.E. Houseman observed that “I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat,” while Dylan Thomas believed that “There is no such thing as poetry, only poems.”

Yet all these definitions do not answer the question, “What is a great poem and what an insignificant one?” No anthology of poems has ever been made which has not stimulated adverse criticism, both from those who are disappointed because many of their favorites, those poems which they consider great, have been omitted, and from those who scorn as trivial some of the inclusions. Generally speaking, these reactions are reflections of personal taste rather than the results of exact critical standards.

When one reads or listens to the reading of a poem, its meaning and value for him are conveyed by more than intellectual comprehension. He experiences it as he does music, or a sunset, or a relationship with a loved one. His estimate is not something which can be put fully into words. If the poem becomes a living part of him, if that which he experiences may be re-created at each new contact with it, it becomes for him one of that precious collection which makes up the personal anthology that every true lover of poetry possesses within him.

Each of the selections in this archive of great poetry has been chosen because it says something that cannot be said in prose, and does so in an unforgettable way. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy sharing them.