Poetry can easily take on a less prominent role in our classrooms than in the days of the PNEU and even be relegated to an elective for a myriad of reasons. Yet it is poetry, “the line that strikes us as we read, that recurs, that we murmur over at odd moments—this is the line that influences our living.”45 And it is poetry that makes “us aware of this thought of the ages, including our own. Every age, every epoch, has its poetic aspect, its quintessence, as it were, and happy the people who have a Shakespeare, a Dante, a Milton, a Burns, to gather up and preserve its meaning as a world
...more
