Ifeel blessed to have lived in a golden era of poetry. My mother read poetry to me, mostly A. A. Milne and Dr. Seuss, in our yard. All my elementary school teachers taught poetry, and my third- and fifth-grade teachers assigned poetry writing. My third-grade poem appeared in the local newspaper — an ode to Arbor Day that is, fortunately, lost to posterity.
The great Anglo-American poets T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden were alive, as was the Harlem Renaissance’s great poet, Langston Hughes; the deaths of Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath were recent. Poets invested in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and E. A. Robinson were coming into their own, including Richard Wilbur, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Poets in the free verse tradition of Walt Whitman, such as Allen Ginsberg and Anne Sexton, were attracting large audiences. Each Sunday the New York Times Book Review came alive with debates over the merits of these poets.
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