I wanted to be a poet. I don’t think anyone but Diane ever knew that. I was studying literature in college and getting a teaching certificate at the same time. But I was crazy about poetry. All the standard poets that we read then. T. S. Eliot. Dylan Thomas. e.e. cummings. Robert Frost. Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson. Individual poems by Housman and Matthew Arnold and John Donne. Shakespeare’s sonnets. Browning. Tennyson. I memorized some of them.
