Over thirty years ago,
an English teacher in a small Texas town buried her AP class under tons of
reading.
And we loved it.
Because the reading she
gave us wasn't just between the pages of a text book.
It was novels by
fabulous fantasy authors like Piers Anthony, Mary Stewart and even L. Frank
Baum.
Poetry by Shelley,
Keats and Whitman.
Julius Ceasar.
The Picture of Dorian Grey…
An entire world of
romance most of us had never realized existed.
Well, she got fired,
but we got fired up, and to this day I am a fan of many of the writers she
introduced me to.
For instance, Walt
Whitman.
WW is amazing for many
reasons, but I love the way he strung words together, and created images, that
we all might have seen, but never truly felt.
He makes me feel, even
to this day, in ways that I had forgotten. One of my favorite Whitman poems,
and one of the first that I reread this month, was "When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloom'd" which he wrote in honor of President Lincoln who had
recently been assassinated.
And that reminds me,
that I should absolutely get in the car and drive over to Springfield to the
Lincoln Museum.
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