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In the years since, despite NEA budget cuts and widespread apathy about the arts, new poetry initiatives (for lack of a better word) have sprung up all over the place. It's not so much that poets themselves have enjoyed renewed support, financial or otherwise, but rather that a kind of civic-minded love of poetry seems to be in style. It's hard to recall a time when National Poetry Month didn't burst upon us every April like some flamboyant antidote to Eliot's famous line. When we didn't have Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky reciting topical verse on the Lehrer Newshour. When there weren't Barnes and Nobles nationwide with whole aisles devoted to poetry, and with portraits of Frost, Yeats and other venerable bards on prominent display. What was it like when Poetry in Motion wasn't offering to brighten New Yorkers' days with thought-provoking verse pasted up in the subway and on buses? When people didn't hang out by the refrigerator at parties, dashing off couplets with their hosts' magnetic poetry kits? Writing programs offering M.F.A.s have proliferated. All across the land, poetry is apparently flourishing.

Americans' Favorite Poems Edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz W.W. Norton & Company, 288 pages Poetry Buy this book at B&N.com

In many ways, all of this is reason to celebrate, especially for a person like me, a fan of the stanza. But oddly, I find myself feeling ambivalent about these well-meant efforts. While I applaud them, I'm not entirely convinced that having James Merrill's poetry posted in the subway means that Everyman is reading it on the way to work. There is value in exposing people to poetry at any level, of course, but I'm not yet sure that that greater exposure means we exist in a poetry-loving nation.

My ambivalence was further aroused when Pinsky started the Favorite Poem Project, for which Americans were asked to send in a beloved poem along with a letter explaining their choice. The poems and letters are to be put into an archive, as a way to give future generations "a snapshot of the United States at the turn of the millennium year, through the lens of poetry." Pinsky was overwhelmed with responses. A nationwide reading series and a Web site were launched, and it turned out that everyone from the president and his wife to the smallest schoolchild seemed to be harboring a favorite poem.

Now, in anticipation of the archive, comes a book called "Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology." Its 200 poems were chosen from the thousands of entries Pinsky and co-editor Maggie Dietz received specifically to represent the diversity of American heritage and interests. It is, in many ways, a wonderful book, by which I mean that it contains many wonderful poems. Leafing through it one night, I was surprised, I admit, to discover one of my own college favorites, "The Rain," by Robert Creeley, who isn't exactly up there with Frost (the most-picked poet) in name recognition. It goes like this:

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent --
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

It's a poem about the discomfort that's inherent to the state of being human and the search for someone to put oneself at ease. The woman who sent "The Rain" to the Favorite Poem Project says as much: "It reminds me of what it is to be human. Stanzas two through four make me uneasy," she writes, "but by five and six I feel content ... I feel that the poem is very earnest, so it reminds me to live life earnestly, to remember what humans can be for each other."

Fair enough. And there are plenty of equally insightful entries in the anthology, each of which speaks clearly and well about the life of poetry in America. But this woman happens to be a bookstore manager, a person who's had both the opportunity and the inclination to read books and think about language.

And in fact, the more you look through "Americans' Favorite Poems," the more apparent it becomes that the majority of the people whose selections have been anthologized hail from fairly well-educated backgrounds. There are nurses and lawyers and doctors, librarians and teachers and professors, and there is a significant number of college and graduate students in the mix. No doubt this was caused at least in part by Pinsky's dual goal, "to represent the variety and interest of the letters received by the Favorite Poem Project while also making an anthology of literary interest." It's hard to make a literary anthology that doesn't rely to some degree on the tastes of well-educated people.

Next page | From "Casey at the Bat" to "Song of Myself"