Literature exists, partly, outside the cacophony of contemporaneous time.  All poems, all novels, all dramas are written in the midst of a tumultuous present.  Yet studying literature – poems, novels, plays – also lifts us outside of present that all too often overwhelms us and separates us from a deep connection to the human.

Washington was for me a new place. I began work on Capitol Hill and found it was an exciting place and a strange one, too.

I have placed the poems and the essays about them in the chronological order in which they were written and in which I sent them out.

There is no reason for you to read the pages chronologically. Read any poem and its accompanying essay any time you want to.

I would suggest you don’t skip over, forever, poets you may never heard about. For a similar reason, I would suggest you don’t skip over poets you may have encountered before and whom you believe you understand.

I began sending poems to colleagues in Washington in March, 2009. This first message was intended as an introduction to my ‘project’ of sending out poems. One can’t, after all, just send poems to people without any context at all.

It has been both exciting and nerve-wracking to think about which poem to begin with. I’ve considered poems by William Carlos Williams, Charles Baudelaire, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Eugenio Montale . . .

I have chosen a poem by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert because it seems to follow so naturally from what I wrote in my introductory message: Why should we read poems?

It is seldom that one stands in utter astonishment before a poem. At least at first reading.

But I want to share with you one of those – for me – rare, signal moments when I have read with total astonishment a poem I had not read previously.

If any have doubts that Wordsworth was a great poet, this lyric should resolve them. If any think poems should be written in ‘poetic language,’ these eight lines written by a poet who uttered a clarion call to eliminate poetic diction and write using “a selection of language really used by men,” this poem should serve as a powerful counter-example showing how the language of poetry can be taken from the language of everyday life.

I’m struck, as I remember what I wrote when I first sent this out, by how easily William Carlos Williams’ short masterwork follows from the Wordsworth poem, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” I had sent out several weeks before.

The poems move in very different directions, the voices enunciating them are deeply dissimilar. One rhymes, the other doesn’t; one is metrical, the other isn’t.

The previous essay ended up with a praise of immanence, a fancy word which means being in the world, rather than above it (which is, in fancier terms, ‘transcendence’). The poem we are about to enter, Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird,” is also about immanence.

But unlike Williams, who was full of wonder at plums and the senses and the joy of language, Frost takes on a very tough issue: How do we live in the world when everything is not as it was formerly? For Williams, a plum is a (momentary) respite from and even recompense for being poor and old. Not so for Frost. In this poem, aging is at the fore.

It is hard not to love Pablo Neruda. He is always lyrical, almost always accessible, and generously given to leaving his readers enriched and refreshed.

Nothing he has written, it seems to me, compares with the late ‘odes’ he wrote about simple objects. I love these poems in praise of his socks, his suit, lemons, and other everyday objects. They speak to me very powerfully about the wonderful world we inhabit. His aim, as I say in the long introduction to his poem, was to speak to those he lived with about the shared wonder of our world.

When I went to Hamilton College all the students were men. I was an English major. All the English professors were men. In four years, I don’t think I read a single woman author other than Virginia Woolf.

I went on to a graduate study in English at conservative, southern Duke University. We read Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, George Eliot. It was unavoidable: along with Dickens and maybe Hardy, they were the greatest British novelists of the nineteenth century. I did not read women poets other than Emily Dickinson.

As a holiday offering, I sent one of my favorite poems virtually without commentary. Mayakovsky’s narrative poem displays the exact reverse of Wordsworth’s sense of a poetic order: “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;/ But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” “An Extraordinary Adventure” begins in despondency and even madness, and ends in gladness.

Elizabeth Bishop in her maturity, like her contemporary Gwendolyn Brooks, was remarkably open to what younger poets were doing.

In the case of Brooks, the political ferment of the Civil Rights movement shaped the Black Arts poets who began writing in its midst and in its aftermath, and in turn the young Black Arts poets had a great impact on the mature Brooks. Her line became looser, her focus became more political.

Many years ago I taught courses in black American literature. I loved Frederick Douglass, both his autobiography and his speeches. He was, in my deeply held view, one of the greatest Americans.

The midcentury African-American poet Robert Hayden wrote a number of poems that deserve to be in the canon of our nation’s finest works. The poem which I discuss here is one of them. It commemorates a great American. It is, at the same time, a great poem.

We were in Vancouver where I had been invited to participate on a panel about the Fulbright Fellowship program. My wife accompanied me to the huge, 5000-strong convention of the AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. There were more attendees, people who taught creative writing, than there are buyers for poetry books or works of cutting-edge fiction.

I did my thing, talking about my experience teaching American poetry in Calcutta on a Fulbright grant. One of the high points of my life. ‘You can do this too,’ I told the audience which attended the panel.

I did not send out a poem for a long time. During the period when I was silent, my mother died. Neither of my parents were readers of poems, though they loved art,– particularly music and, above all, painting. My father would quote lines from Goethe he had learned in his youth, I think largely because he had been taught that Goethe was a great genius. My mother, well, she loved drawing and pastels and painting, and she loved looking at paintings. I think of all poems she would have been particularly drawn to the poem I discuss in what follows, Walt Whitman’s “The Wound-Dresser.”

A while after sending out Walt Whitman’s “The Wound-Dresser,” I wrote an email about music. It was prefaced by a headnote, which I reproduce below.

There is a link between poems and music. Both are dependent on sound, although in the case of music it is almost entirely so, while with poems semantic content is of primary importance. I find that usually music appeals directly to my emotional being: it makes me happy or sad or excited. But particularly as I listen to Bach, whom I have fallen in love with over the past seven or eight years, or Beethoven I also respond deeply to structure. In music, one can hear structure, one can intuit it directly.

Let me begin with a story.

It was 1969 and I was a graduate student at Duke University. I had a special fellowship which stipulated that in addition to doing my doctoral research I work with a ‘master teacher.’ Working in American literature, I was assigned to Louis Budd, a Mark Twain scholar. He was an exceptionally fine and decent man. I faithfully attended his introductory survey of 19th century American literature.