A Year of Poetry. Now that's a Resolution!

This year I wanted to make my resolution one that I could actually carry out (Hershey's was relieved to hear I wasn't going to give up chocolate again), but also one that would make me a better person. Sure, I could make the "lose weight" resolution, but that's a life goal, not just a yearly one.

   

 My Real Life Partner

This year, however, I chose to take the path less traveled by (pun intended). Being a student of the humanities, I have spent hours reading and studying "the classics", but I haven't had the time to spend reading the works of more modern, and relatively younger, authors. 

 

 The Picture of Youth

Instead of Virgil and Catullus, I'm going to be working my way through the poetry of more recent authors. I've set up a list of poets by month, so that I can give each poet enough time so as not to offend them, although I am afraid I'll end up offending at least one of them.

Lookin' at You, Ms. Dickinson

And so it shall begin. I'm not sure how it will end, or even where I'll stand when December comes around, but I hope that this blog and my experience with these great writers will inspire both me and you to read more of "the classics" and develop a stronger appreciation for those who came before us. The line-up of poets stands as:

                    January             Robert Frost

                    February          Maya Angelou

                    March              Oscar Wilde

                    April                 T.S. Eliot

                    May                  e e cummings

                    June                  Robert Browning

                    July                   John Keats

                    August              Rudyard Kipling

                    September        Alfred, Lord Tennyson

                    October            Edgar Allan Poe

                    November        Emily Dickinson

                    December         Walt Whitman

Feel free to give me feedback on the list! I'm willing to shift these around, but obviously I cannot do that if the month has already passed. I am fully aware of the large number of great poets that I'm leaving off of this list, but these are the ones that have caught my attention in the past. Perhaps this will be my year with Mr. Keating and I'll end it by standing on a desk and screaming "Oh Captain my Captain!" with tears in my eyes, or I'll stand alone and fall on my ass.

                        The Rest of the Class:

            "Oh Captain My Captain!"

                        Me:

"Oh Captain My F#&*ing GOD!"

This may be a great adventure which I hope to share with all of you, or it could end up being a solitary journey, but, regardless, no knowledge is useless. By the end of this year, I will have spent time with 12 of the greatest minds of our ancestors and stolen a peek into their minds. There's no way that I can come out unchanged, but I'm willing and ready for this challenge.

And so here we are, friends, at the crossroads. We're in the yellow woods and we have a choice to make. I'm going down the path less traveled by, and I'm inviting you along. I'll bring the wine.

Wine. That makes all the difference.