Americans' Favorite Poems by Favorite Poem Project (U. S.)

Please add your own to the list in the comments below: Here, in no particular order, are some of my favorite poems. But I have always taken poetry to heart and drawn upon it when I need it most, whether to give words to joy, or grief, or loneliness, or love. I think the days when I will allow my over-full, goodly heart to flow into a godawful attempt at a sonnet are probably over. I have also written “verse,” though nothing I would inflict on our readers here. That’s a wonderful legacy from my growing up - maybe from yours too. I am happy to say that I encountered “verse” in all of those settings. ….hile late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Americans generally assumed that a poet’s intentions mattered, the insistence of some of Pinsky’s correspondents on their interpretive prerogatives is only a more extreme, less constrained version of how earlier individuals appropriated verse in schoolrooms, civic celebrations, parlors, religious settings, and campfire recitations (403).

This way of reading, Rubin concludes, is not so much a postmodern departure as a persistent return to how American readers have tended to approach poetry. Though the texts remained, the meaning for the reader might have changed - or, put another way, the reader might have given new meaning to a familiar text.

Many of the poems readers submitted were works they had first encountered in a school setting, and they were texts to which the readers had returned throughout their lives. In the coda to her wonderful study, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Harvard, 2007) Joan Shelley Rubin considers what the responses to Robert Pinsky’s “Favorite Poem Project” suggest about how poetry is (still) useful and meaningful for Americans today.

Americans' Favorite Poems by Favorite Poem Project (U. S.)