Good poems are instantly recognizable. They startle, shock new life into old ideas, impress on the mind patterns of beauty and truth previously unnoticed. Often, as John Keats wrote, they “strike the reader as the wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
Every year, birthday to birthday, I chose a poem of my year. I have been doing this since my 38th birthday so I now have forty-six of them and I am thinking of publishing in a very small edition for family and friends an anthology of these poems for my 85th birthday next year. I think