Poems for Life

Jane Alexander is director of the National Endowment for the Arts. She won a Tony award for The Great White Hope , and has appeared in a number of films.

I think she speaks to the potential transformation we all have inside ourselves. The poem also expresses a hunger for spiritual liberation and a deep love for Life.

my favorite poet, Alice Walker.

fact, one of my favorite ways to pass an afternoon is paging through a thick two-volume set I’ve owned for years called Chief Modern Poets of Britain and America.

and I’m glad you invited me to choose a favorite poem for the anthology.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Next time we are in the elevator together, please do introduce yourself.

With warm good wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Also Matthew Arnold was a great figure at Balliol College, Oxford, where I was an undergraduate, and I belonged to a society named after him.

Shakespeare, John Donne, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Frank O’Hara, and a lot more.

For me, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” is a poem of sentimentality at its very best.