Immortal Poems of the English Language

Even as a well-acknowledged nerdy English teacher, I can probably count on the fingers of both hands the number of people I know who regularly read poetry and who would claim that they really "get" it. I used to want to be one of those people. I just...wasn't (with the notable exception of Shel Silverstein, whom I loved and who, I thought, didn't count.) In high school, I decided to change that by reading poetry anyway. When, on a road trip, my parents offered to buy me any book in the bookstore to entertain me (before cars had TVs and any of us had cell phones) I reluctantly turned away from the novels I could have polished off in a few hours and bought Immortal Poems of the English Language. It seemed reasonable to start with the best, right?

 

It's arranged chronologically, which means that the first poems were written by "anonymous." Shakespeare didn’t appear on the scene for over seventy pages. Truth: I had no idea what I was reading. I didn't like it. But for some reason that, many years later, I must confess that I admire about myself, I kept going. I read/skimmed/looked at the whole damned boring book. Hundreds of pages of poems I didn’t really understand. I could read all the words, but I felt like I was missing something--the thing that makes poetry worthwhile. There were a few spots around the romantics that made me pause, although I really only READ the shorter poems. (I still prefer a poem to be under two pages, honestly.) There were several that seemed not worth rereading just then, but maybe turning down the corner of the page to read later. Every now and then, I'd go back to Immortal Poems of the English Language and read a bit. I still didn't love poetry, but sometimes, for a second or two, it sort of meant something to me.

 

I took the book with me to college. I wanted to want to read it.

 

One very cold night when my roommate was off-campus and my heart was broken and I couldn't sleep, I remembered one of those poems. I REMEMBERED a poem I hadn't realized I'd learned in the first place. I got up and turned the light back on and flipped through The Immortal Poems of the English Language, looking for it. But while I looked for it, another poem caught my eye, and I read that. Huh. I still didn’t fully understand it, I still felt like I was missing something that I didn’t know how to truly see, but even so, I FELT the poem. It clicked. It spoke to me. It went beyond liking.

 

Heart pounding, I kept looking for the poem I thought I remembered. I read a few other poems along the way. I felt a couple of those two. Awed, I read the poem I had wanted to find. I was lonely and heartbroken and trapped in a small room at 2 am, and the poem said what I needed it to say exactly the way I needed it to say it. It dropped a little something solid into what felt like a deep, howling, swirling hole in my center. 

 

I turned the light back off, opened the curtains, and stared out into the sub-zero night through the crystals that had formed on my window. I repeated the words of the poem. I felt like I was really seeing nighttime for the first time. I felt like I was seeing ice for the first time. My life simultaneously zoomed out into a long, still-empty mystery and focused in on that particular, specific, fully-known moment: that particular scene, those particular words. That was the first moment when I felt both deep gratitude and yearning hunger for the right words.

 

I’d say I still don’t “get” more poems than I do “get,” but that energizing mix of gratitude and hunger for poetry has become regular and familiar, if no less comfortable than that first night I felt it. Every year when I take a deep, trembling breath and try to teach poetry to teenagers, I start by telling this story and showing them my now tattered copy of Immortal Poems of the English Language. It’s one book I never loan out, partly because it means so much to me and partly because it’s actually kind of a dumb place to start reading poetry.