I also liked teaching poems because I believed poetry was where the English language really soared. It was utilitarian most of the time but somehow able to turn its simple grammar and plundered vocabulary into the finest poetry written: Shakespearean sonnets and Keatsian odes, and Chaucer and Eliot and Pound. I knew and loved them all for different reasons. When I wanted wisdom, I found Dickinson; sorrow, Yeats; company in my grief, Wordsworth.
