On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere, a Boston silversmith, was asked by Joseph Warren to ride to Lexington, Massachusetts to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that the British troops were marching to arrest them. After crossing the Charles River by rowboat, he rode to Lexington, alerting patriots along the way. Revere got word to Adams and Hancock, but was captured by a British Army patrol on his way to Concord. Revere … Read more »
Emily Dickinson (1830–86) once defined poetry this way: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?”
Dickinson’s elliptical poem 1129, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” (1868), often affects readers … Read more »
Like yesterday’s poem, “The Man Born to Farming,” Katherine Lee Bates’ “Pikes Peak” (better known as the song “America the Beautiful”) evokes pastoral pride. The poem was inspired by the sights Bates had seen on a train ride to and from Colorado Springs, especially by the vista she beheld from the top of Pikes Peak.
As she explained, “Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the … Read more »
Last year, the essayist, poet, novelist, and farmer Wendell Berry delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities. At the time, David Skinner, editor of Humanities Magazine, wrote that Berry “is the sum of his beliefs. . . . Instead of being at odds with his conscience, he is at odds with his times. Cheerful in dissent, he writes to document and defend what is … Read more »
First published in 1923, “The Red Wheelbarrow” is one of those poems that most students encounter at some point in their educational career, and it’s worth returning to thereafter. At eight lines and just 16 words long, the poem is short and seemingly simple, and yet through its carefully arranged sounds and striking imagery it lends itself to endless interpretation.
William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), the poem’s author, was born in Rutherford, … Read more »
A sestina is a structured poem consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a final three-line stanza, for a total of 39 lines in the poem. The end-words of the first stanza are used, in a set pattern, to end lines in the remaining five stanzas. For example, if the first line of the poem ends in the word “peace,” “peace” will be used to end the … Read more »
In yesterday’s poem, Carl Sandburg described the “Stormy, husky, brawling, / City of the Big Shoulders” city of Chicago. Today, we look at another part of America: the redwood forests that inhabit northern California, seemingly from time eternal. Before reading Dana Gioia’s “Becoming a Redwood,” though, explore this photo gallery of redwood trees to better imagine the portrait that Gioia paints.
Originally from Los Angeles, California, Read more »
Distinguished scholar-teachers Amy and Leon Kass demonstrate how short stories, speeches, and songs can be used to enhance civic education and how a pedagogical approach that stresses learning through inquiry can make primary sources come alive for students of all ages.
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