[Janice D. Soderling]

It sometimes happens, when reading through a poetry journal or anthology, that suddenly a poem will seize the mind and the reader understands a deeper significance that isn't expressly stated. It is as if the poem rises from the page and briefly takes possession of the entire universe.

I remember a few poems that affected me this way. One was Federico Garcia Lorca's Romance Sonambulo (I don't remember the translator), another Eugenio Montale's Forse un mattino andando in un'aria di vetro in the translation by George Kay, another Caesar Vallejo's Los dados eternos (I believe the translation is by Michael Hamburrger. There have been other instances I could mention but these three are indelibly etched in my life. I can't say why. Impeccable translation can't explain it, though no other translations of the Montale poem will ever serve me as well as the Kay one. That I was in some way receptive to the content at the time in my life I first encountered the poem obviously is not with significance.

Only slightly lower on the scale of this profound reaction is the sense of oneness with the poet/poem I received at first reading and with every successive read of widely disparate poems, poems that for diverse reasons remain in the mind. Frost's Acquainted with the Night is in that category, as is Eliot's The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, and Lucille Clifton's Miss Rosie and Josephine Jacobsen's Gentle Reader, Cavafay's Waiting for the Barbarians, also e.e. cumming's somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond. There are others, many others. Dana Gioia comes to mind, Anthony Hecht.

Everyone has a list like this, favorites for personal reasons, but even more perhaps they are memorable because of superior craftsmanship which makes the poem accessible; it is there for the taking. Though it is less common, I remember a few specific instances when I have been affected this way by prose.

An essay collection to which I often return is Anthony Hecht's Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry. I would rather quote his appreciation of the work of Richard Wilbur than waste the time of others with my own thoughts on accessibility and depth that can't contribute a fraction of the below:

First of all, a superb ear (unequaled, I think, in the work of any poet now writing in English) for stately measures, cadences of a slow, processional grandeur, and a rich ceremonial orchestration. A philosophic bent and a religious temper, which are by no means the same thing, but which here consort comfortably together. Wit, polish, a formal elegance that is never haughty or condescending [… ] and an unfeigned gusto,…[…] But in a way I think most characteristic of all, his is the most kinetic poetry I know: verbs are among his most conspicuously important tools, and his poetry is everywhere a vision of action, of motion and performance. […] for again and again in Wilbur's poems this admirable grace or strength of body is a sign of or a symbol for the inward motions of the mind or condition of the soul. It is remarkable that this double fluency, of style and of perceptions, should be so singularly Wilbur's own.

(my emphasis in red).

Consider the elegant simplicity of Thyme flowering among rocks. I'd love to reproduce it here but will link to a site that has copyright permission. http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/content/57/13/iv.full