A freshman dorm mate won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry nearly a decade ago.

 

Urdu qutationes

The days when schoolchildren were required to memorize long passages from Romantic and Victorian poetry are, alas, over. My poem, by the way, was “The Wreck of the Schooner Hesperus” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I can still quote passages on demand.

While the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts claimed that 28 million Americans (two-thirds women) had read a poem in the last year and CNN proclaims that “Poetry is experiencing a new golden age,” one would have to have a heart of stone not to scoff.