Contents

Teachers’ Note

Introduction: “Poetry Emotion” by Anna Quindlen

Contributors (in alphabetical order) and their selections:

JANE ALEXANDER “In Black Earth, Wisconsin” by Andrea Musher

BROOKE ASTOR “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth

KEN AULEITA “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

HAROLYN M. BLACKWELL “To Be Somebody” by Langston Hughes

MARTIN CHARNIN “Laughing Down Lonely Canyons” by James Cavenaugh

MARIO CUOMO “Outwitted” by Edwin Markham

DAVID DINKINS “Stars” by Langston Hughes

E. L. DOCTOROW “A Blessing” by James Wright

GERALDINE FERRARO “If” by Rudyard Kipling

ALLEN GINSBERG “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

RUDOLPH GIULIANI “If I can stop one Heart from breaking” by Emily Dickinson

RICHARD F. GREIN Excerpt from “Four Quartets” by T. S. Eliot

DAVID HALBERSTAM Excerpt from “The Passing of Arthur” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

SHELDON HARNICK “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman

BILL IRWIN “The Yachts” by William Carlos Williams

PETER JENNINGS “Man with Wooden Leg Escapes Prison” by James Tate

EDWARD I. KOCH “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe

KENNETH KOCH “The Dawn of Me” by Jeff Morley

JILL KREMENTZ “The Low Road” by Marge Piercy

ANGELA LANSBURY “Cuttin’ Rushes” by Moira O’Neill

YO-YO E. MA “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats

DAVID MAMET “The Dog” by David Mamet

JASON MCMANUS “I never saw a Moor” by Emily Dickinson

JOAN S. MCMENAMIN “Life Is Mostly” by A. L. Gordon and “He That Loveth” by Thomas a Kempis

VED MEHTA “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold

ISMAIL MERCHANT “Song” by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

RUTH W. MESSINGER “The Gift Outright” by Robert Frost

SUSAN MINOT “When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be” by John Keats

JOYCE CAROL OATES “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” by Emily Dickinson

RON PADGETT “A Step Away from Them” by Frank O’Hara

HAROLD PRINCE “Credo” by Thomas Wolfe

ANNA QUINDLEN “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by W. B. Yeats

DAVID READ “Holy Sonnet XIV” (“Batter my heart, three-personed God”) by John Donne

RICHARD W. RILEY “Duty Was Joy” by Rabindranath Tagore

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI “Get Yourself Drunk” by Charles Baudelaire

GENE SAKS “Does It Matter?” by Siegfried Sassoon

DIANE SAWYER “If” by Rudyard Kipling

WHITNEY NORTH SEYMOUR JR. Excerpt from “Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood” by William Cullen Bryant

ALLY SHEEDY “On Stripping Bark from Myself” by Alice Walker

BEVERLY SILLS “It Is Not the Critic Who Counts” by Theodore Roosevelt

MARGARET CHASE SMITH “My Creed” by Margaret Chase Smith

RONALD B. SOBEL “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

STEPHEN SONDHEIM “Come to the Edge” by Christopher Logue

LIV ULLMANN “Meditation #17” (“No Man is an Island”) by John Donne

KURT VONNEGUT “The Angel that presided o’er my birth” by William Blake

WENDY WASSERSTEIN Excerpt from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

PAUL WATKINS “Clouds” by Rupert Brooke

ELIE WIESEL “From Tomorrow On, I Shall Be Sad” by Motele

ELIZABETH WINTHROP “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver

TOM WOLFE Excerpt from “I’ve Been to a Marvelous Party” by Noel Coward

Grade V Students

Contributors

Acknowledgments