Presented by The Academy of American Poets, Committed to Memory is the essential poetry collection for every home library -- a gathering of the world's best-loved poems, chosen specifically for memorization. These poems carry on a timeless tradition kept alive not in libraries but through a cycle of reciting, listening, memorizing, and reciting anew. From beloved classics like Rudyard Kipling's "If' and Robert Frost's "The Road Less Traveled" to family favorites like Ernest Lawrence Thayer's "Casey at the Bat" and Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky", the poems in this collection will engage and delight both young and old. The poets include some of the greatest names in literature -- Shakespeare, Poe, Whitman, Bronte, Hardy, Browning, cummings, Joyce, and Dickinson. A truly timeless collection, Committed to Memory is a gift of love and language that will enrich readers' lives for years to come.

This book is a collection of pattern poems - poems whose printed format presents a picture of some familiar object that is also the subject of the text. Patterned poems, also called shaped verse, are part of a long tradition that extends from Alexandrian Greek poets to Lewis Carroll and beyond. The poems in this book, written by the poet John Hollander, are on subjects ranging from a beach umbrella and a popsicle to time, love and idea.

In The Poetry of Everyday Life, John Hollander grapples with issues of poetry and the imagination. In a series of aphorisms, The book's title essay distinguishes between poetry's relations to the rest of life and other kinds of literature that merely deal literally with it. The essay introduces a range of other prose writing, from poetic fictions in prose (which Hollander calls "enigmatic narratives") to literary essays and memoirs of poets such as W. H. Auden, James Merrill, and Anthony Hecht. There are observations on the eternal problem of verse translation, as well as an interview with Langdon Hammer. Unburdened by theoretical agendas, both the short fables and the critical essays in this volume concern various aspects of the ways in which poetry can engage life most strongly when it most deeply regards itself.