Evans Library Celebrates National Poetry Month
National Poetry Month is a literary and artistic celebration to encourage support for poets and poetry. Created in 1996, the celebration also aims to poetry appreciation throughout the United States. At Evans Library, we’re celebrating National Poetry Month with some of our favorite poetry:
From Dr. Sohair Wastawy:
Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led by thee into ever-widening thought and action —
Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.
William Ernest Henley Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Some of our other favorites:
- Emily Dickinson “Hope” is the thing with feathers
- Robert Frost The Road not Taken and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
- Seuss aka Theodor Geisel Happy Birthday to You! and The Lorax
- John Keats
- William Blake Auguries of Innocence
