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.

In this major new collection, John Hollander displays the elegance, versatility, and wit that mark him as perhaps the most urbane poet in America. "In Time and Place" features a generous offering of new verse, an extended prose piece, and a series of prose poems previously available only in a rare, privately published edition. The tightly rhymed quatrains of the new poems demonstrate once again the freedom Hollander achieves through mastery of form. The consummate control with which he writes in memoriam to a lost love and a time of absence gives him opportunities to move through dimensions most poets never see. His purgatorial mock-journal—dwelling on loss and gain, on difference and effacement, on places and the place of writing—leads into a sequence of captivating prose poems, where imagination centers on the word and language celebrates its own creation.

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.