Anne Bradstreet (America's first woman poet)
"These are not the poets you remember from high school who sit in lonely rooms writing maudlin words that few might hear and fewer comprehend."
Willliam Shakespeare
This is the opening paragraph of an article about protest poetry that appeared in the Style Section of "The Washington Post" on March 12th.
Geoffrey Chaucer
It may be the poets the author of this article remembers, but it is certainly not the poets that I remember that were introduced to me in high school. I am sorry that the author had such bad luck.
Emily Dickinson
The depth and power of the poetry of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Thomas, Yeats, Keats, Milton, Hopkins were not maudlin to me. The poetry of Longfellow, Frost, Browning, Emerson, Dickinson, Crane, Coleridge, Carroll to name a few, were very understandable, even to a teenager.
W.B. Yeats
The author goes on to say..."Poets you say...Aren't they those solitary creatures, slaves to pen and paper, pulling out strands of hair, beating on unforgiving keys of typewriters and computers, always reaching for the more perfect word."
John Keats
I suppose this is written so as to contrast dramatically with the protest poets reading an antiwar poem near the Capitol.
John Milton
I cheer them on. But please dear Post writer, we are among you in other guises---not solitary, slaves, or hair pullers.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
We are just plain folks that love words, language, reading poetry and sometimes taking a stab at writing a poem.
