Library of America's American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, a big boxed set of old old poets from Longfellow and Whittier and Poe through Whitman and Dickinson, was a big jolting experience to this old English major, including as it does my dad's favorite poets in there along with the few we studied in college English. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, of course, tower over such versifiers as James Whitcomb Riley and Paul Laurence Dunbar — they possess a miraculous purity that allows a reader of 2004 to read them as contemporaries and fellow travellers and pals — but it's lovely to look at the other fish in the pond that Whitman and Dickinson swam in and be surprised at their power and wit.

Nobody is immune to the gothic swash of "The Raven" — read it aloud and it sweeps you right up — but Longfellow, that good gray eminence, now almost entirely unread beyond ninth grade, is worth a longer look. My dad loved him and now I'm old enough to appreciate how hard earned Longfellow's simple grace was. And even Whittier's "Snow-Bound" — an epic of descriptive verse that has a cumulative power that sneaks up on you, accustomed as you are to miniatures. And then there's Bryant's "Thanatopsis" and Longfellow's "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" and Whittier's "Barbara Frietchie," which no English major ever deigned to write a term paper about, but they are powerful poems all. I once memorized "Barbara Frietchie" ("'Shoot if you must this old grey head/But spare your country's flag,' she said") for a gig at Whittier College in California and hollered out the lines "'Who touches a hair of yon grey head/Dies like a dog! March on!' he said" and made a couple old ladies jump.

This is stuff that Ezra Pound and the moderns were in revolt against, or flight from, and it's shocking to go back and see how good the old chestnuts are. We live in the time of the M.F.A. in Creative Writing, when 10,000 able, brave, confident, determined, energetic poets are busy turning out very capable imagistic verse in homage to Bly, Merwin, Ashbery, Sexton, Oliver, et al., which is all well and good, but who is writing poems that other people will want to memorize and recite aloud and make old ladies jump? Not so many.

My dad knew a lot of old poems by heart, most of them collected here, and when you read them aloud, you can see why he would've gone to the trouble. The words coming out of memory, bypassing the eye, take on the incantatory voice that has power beyond style and individual genius, the power of enchantment. They can't teach you about enchantment in English class; you have to find it on your own. I found it in this book.

About Garrison Keillor
Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion, now in its twenty-fifth year on the air. He is the author of fourteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers Love Me, Lake Wobegon Summer 1956, Wobegon Boy, and Lake Wobegon Days, and the editor of the anthology Good Poems. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.