National Poetry Month, Take 3

National Poetry Month is a time when schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets throughout the United States band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture. In our third and final installment of favorite poems from Gaithersburg Book Festival Committee members, we give you two final sets of recommendations. (If you missed them, go back and check out our first and second installments of this series.)

From Becky Meloan, who serves on our author recruitment committee:
Because at heart I am a hopeless romantic, my favorite line of poetry is from Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”

“Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove”

And my favorite poem is the romantically tragic “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allen Poe because I love Poe’s rhythms, which are similar in a way to Dr. Seuss, another great poet.

From Carolyn Crosby:
One of my favorites is “To An Athlete Dying Young” by A.E. Housman. I first heard it read in the movie “Out of Africa” and I just loved the way it sounded when read. It has really stuck with me over the years.