I remember buying my first copy of Yeats' Collected Poems when I was fifteen. I took the bus one empty September weekend from Killiney, in Dublin, where I was in boarding school, and went into the bookshop which is now Waterstone's bookstore, but then was the old Hodges Figgis, with its airy interiors and round tables piled with magazines. I wasn't a particularly bookish teenager. And so I remember the long bus journey—the sight of the coast when I was leaving and returning, the bracelet of lights in the distance towards Bray—much better than why I went to buy the book. But I did buy it. And went back to school clutching the handsome burgundy hardback with its cream milled covers. And read it. And read it.

But why? I certainly wasn't his inevitable reader. I was hardly more than a stranded teenager, home from London and New York, back in Ireland after years away at the supremely inconvenient moment of fourteen years of age: Unable to name the country I came from. Unable to come from it until I could name it. I felt awkward—an impostor, waiting for my differences and mistakes to be noticed. And so what was it that made me connect so easily, obstinately, powerfully with this finished and magisterial poet who belonged so totally to his country that he felt free to invent it? What is it that makes me connect to this day, across decades, more knowledge and suspicion and under-standing than I had then? Yeats has been the poet I have loved most, have understood most, have returned to most often. And the return is not enacted by going to my shelves and taking down that book with its childish inscription. It is a return made up of the continuous, shiny breakages of memory, of lines and melodies that come in and out of my mind and memory.

The Collected Poems I read is still very much the standard version of Yeats' work. It is arranged chronologically. It goes from the first clipped-off lyrics of his London and Dublin years. And I like to think of him as he describes himself in those years: haunter of libraries and of cranky East End spiritualist meetings. Equally at the edge of The Cheshire Cheese and Grub Street. A young man who, if you had met him in Kensington or on the Strand, might have seemed part fop and part country bumpkin. A young man, however, who went back to a succession of boarding houses and cold rooms and crafted and re-crafted his early poems on a strange frontier between the Pre-Raphaelites and the first stirrings of the Irish revival.

I think for every writer who has been influenced and changed by another one, for every poet who carries another poet with them into their life, there is probably always an epicenter. For me it comes right smack in the middle of the Collected Poems.

The poem is "The Wild Swans at Coole." The poet who wrote it and lived it is not at all the awkward and charming poseur of fin de si�cle London. This is an older man—engaged, embittered. He returns in his middle years to the Galway woods, to the late summer twilight, to the freakish, distant white of the swans gathering and making noise. What he makes in turn is a new Irish pastoral: something to put all the easier poetry of place to shame.

I have looked upon these brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore. All's changed since I, hearing at twilight, The first time on this shore, The bell-beat of their wings above my head, Trod with a lighter tread. Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold Companionable streams or climb the air; Their hearts have not grown old; Passion or conquest, wander where they will, Attend upon them still.

Here is the Yeats I first knew. Fiercely musical. Lost in control. It seems impossible that a man and a poet could become more real the more he becomes a master of artifice. But that is precisely what his poems achieved. And in my case, they achieved something to be treasured even more. Here in this gritty twilight, in this disillusioned and complicated series of rhymes and half-rhymes and repeating cadences, I began to hear something different—the sound, at last, of a place where I might no longer be an impostor. A place which could be made exact in language and therefore hospitable to the very degrees of estrangement I felt.

These discoveries, made in reading, can last a lifetime. But they aren't private, of course, and can't be exclusive. In any case, things have changed. The bus in from the coast has shimmered and changed into the Dart. The Saturday traffic is as dense as a Friday afternoon. The buildings are bulkier, the cars sleeker, and the streets more crowded. But someone else is taking down that book from the shelf, even as I write this. Is bringing it back. Will read it after dark. Someone else will carry that exact magic with them forever. As I have. And always will.

Lynn Emanuel—

Green, I love you green.
—Federico Garcia Lorca

It was 1967 or '68, and I was a college freshman in Dr. Warner's (or Warren's) class, working my way through The Norton Anthology of English Literature. It was early in the term. I know this because "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," which we were reading, is at the beginning of that two-volume set, barely half an inch into the eight inches that begin with "Caedmon's Hymn" and end with T. S. Eliot. I was having a miserable time. I loved literature, but I didn't love to read. Those sudden moments of erasure—when my self seemed to disappear from my body and seep into the book, when the book absorbed me, took me up and gave me its shape—I found, and still find, a painful and difficult act of devotion. A book was God. I was its pilgrim.

In any case, I was trying (as all of us in that room were trying) to read and understand "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." And someone—not me I am sure, I was too good a student to ask a question—but someone asked: Why the green knight? And Dr. Warner, or Warren, said, looking out the window (it was spring), that green stood for rebirth and hope, return, just as the leaves come back, green, to the trees.

In the wake of this utterance, I stood like Helen Keller with my hand under the spout of the pump, and Anne Sullivan frantically signing water into my other palm. There was something at once so completely revelatory and unsettling in that answer that, thirty years later, it is still one of those enigmatic and emblematic moments of education that sticks me like a burr. If, like God, the anonymous author of "Sir Gawain" could put the world into the word and I could draw it out centuries later, then why could I not put something into a word and have someone retrieve it? Why was a word not like a box or a door with things coming into and going out of it and many hands opening and closing it?

I feel a certain discomfort at my mech-anical, materialist interpretation (although I like its democratic spirit): my sense that things could be put into and gotten out of words, transported from the 1400s embalmed in the casket of the word green to be opened by me. And yet haven't I, this green girl, become a word that contains certain things that I have put there and that you will take away? ("What did you take away from the car crash scene in this story?" the teacher asks.)

But there was something else I took from the lesson on "Sir Gawain," and it had to do with the way in which the world and the word stood in opposition to each other: the tension that crackled to attention in the fissures between the actual green of that campus in 1967 or '68 (and the war that lay just beyond it) and the word green produced by and embedded in the book.

I had come to see that a word's purpose was not transparent. A word was not a window open to a view of the world. The word, obdurate, opaque, was in the world, but not of it. The word was a peculiar object, and I came to love its special properties: it waited upon the reader, was activated by the devotions of the eye, had only the smallest, stingiest smell of its manufacture—ink, paper—and only two colors, black on white. And the world of the word was governed (as much as the world outside the window was governed by the laws of physics) by the inexorable laws of grammar and syntax, symbolism, allegory, metaphor. It was more than odd. It was strange and unsettling to encounter a world alien to my own, yet one which existed in a peculiar, parallel tension with my own—which is, of course, the way we describe science fiction, and, now that I consider it, might also be a way of describing God.

Carolyn Kizer—

Coached by my parents, I learned to read before I started school at age five and a half. My mother, who kept meticulous notes on my reading, somehow omitted Gertrude Stein, whose poem "Grass" was the first I learned by heart:

Be cool inside the mule, Be cool inside the mule, Be cool inside with a monkey tied, Be cool inside the mule.

(It became a sort of mantra, which I still say to myself sometimes when trying to fall asleep.) I taught myself numbers by singing them to the tune of the Barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffman: "One and two and three and four...." I read the usual children's books, but my next real love was Bernard Shaw. My mother discovered a copy of Mrs. Warren's Profession in the bathroom. I had no idea of what it was about, but I was enthralled by Shaw's wit and his sardonic view of humankind. I think this was a lasting influence. An early male critic said that my poems made him run his finger around his collar. This was meant to be unflattering, but premature feminist that I was, I found it delightful. (I was about eight when I discovered Shaw, according to my mother's notebook.) Of course I was a promiscuous child, and read everything I could get my hands on, and as other poets have said, this included the text on breakfast food packages and the labels on ketchup bottles, as well as having free run of my parents' library. No attempt was ever made to censor my reading. I remember when the public librarian attempted to steer me towards the children's book section, and my mother's firm admonition to her that I could read grown-ups' books if I so chose.

My parents were both romantics: father favored the poems of Keats; mother went for Whitman. No evening of my childhood passed without my being read to. But I think my choices of Stein and Shaw show that my tastes were different. I remember that when I was eleven or twelve I came storming home from school demanding, "Why didn't you ever tell me about Pope and Dryden?" They were stunned. Our library, copious as it was, didn't contain the works of either. These were lasting influences. I have continued to prefer, and write, poems that have what you might call "a sting in the tail." Add Catullus and Juvenal. I adored wit, irony, and intellectual precision. And I have always insisted on being funny from time to time. I wouldn't advise young poets today to follow in my footsteps. Poetry is serious stuff; it doesn't pay to be funny. I used to get letters from young women regarding the lines from my "Pro Femina," which end the third section:

...if wedded, kill guilt in its tracks when we stack up the dishes, And defect to the typewriter. And if mothers believe in the luck of our children, Whom we forbid to devour us, whom we shall not devour, And the luck of our husbands and lovers, who keep free women.

I was so often queried about that last line that I had a stamp made that said, "Irony, Irony, Irony." As you see, the poem is in a classical meter, much influenced by the great Roman satirists. It is the grief of my life that I didn't have a classical education. My mother, who'd had years and years of Greek and Latin, and felt that they had been useless, concentrated on my being "creative," as she wished she had been. It was years before I realized what these languages had done for her, and by then it was too late. I had been sent to Sarah Lawrence. "If only I'd had a classical education" has become a family joke with my husband, who had one. But my parents had done so much to further my education by teaching me to love reading and writing that I shouldn't really blame them for not sensing my cast of mind. And I have remained true to my first loves for these many years.

Yusef Komunyakaa—

Perhaps it was how the poem's title first wedded my tongue, without any hesitation, conscious negotiation, or humbug: "Annabel Lee." It seemed as if some deep part of myself already knew the rhythm and emotion of this name—a Southernness in its music. But Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" also ushered in a disquieting mystery and the strange feeling of eavesdropping on something almost taboo.

At nine years old, I knew next to nothing about this kind of love, although I had been lightly touched by an element of it in the blues that drifted out of the radios in our kitchen and living room. To know this great longing through words made me tremble inside my skin, and I believe it helped me traverse some new territory in my imagination. "Annabel Lee" was familiar and distant, ethereal and knowable, and not quite flesh: Had she wandered from across the tracks to my forbidden "neck of the woods," and why did I sense her with such imaginative authority? She was there and not there. In this sense, I feel that I grasped Poe's Gothicness. But I had also been transported in my psyche to immediate possibility: my Annabel Lee became a honey-colored Goldie Rae Magee. And I can still half hear my nine-year-old voice saying, "She was a child and I was a child, / In this kingdom by the sea...."

At the time, of course, when I memorized this first poem, I couldn't have been conscious that this otherworldly love between two children embodied Poe's recurring theme of Death in Love. Also, I don't believe I was fully aware of the possible critique of class in the poem. Now, "So that her highborn kinsmen came" seems more about authorial reality than an excursion into gothic imagination. And there is another moment in the poem that challenged the regional orthodoxy I grew up with: "And neither the angels in Heaven above / Nor the demons down under the sea, / Can ever dissever my soul from the soul...." Within the psychological iconography in which I was born and raised in rural Louisiana, angels and demons were more than powerful; there wasn't any human emotion that could challenge them or diminish their powers.

It should be no surprise that James Weldon Johnson's "The Creation" would be the second poem I memorized. At Sweet Beulah Baptist Church, Reverend Duncan could really preach—no doubt about that. But there is something in "The Creation" that transported me beyond my imagination. This lyrical narrative has a fiery precision that pulled me into its sway: I felt lost and found through the poem's music. Yes, in many ways, Duncan's image of God parallels Johnson's: "And God walked, and where He trod / His footsteps hollowed the valleys out / And bulged the mountains up." This majestic, brute force seems like a forerunner of some god of high-tech thunder—a bionic godhead. But there was also something different about Johnson's God: "This Great God, / Like a mammy bending over her baby, / Kneeled down in the dust / Toiling over a lump of clay...." In retrospect, now I know it had to have been the cinematic Southernness of this image that connected me emotionally to Johnson's poem. I feel that I knew this surreal figuration: it seemed to weigh flesh against all the abstraction and hyperbole, alongside an exhortation and metaphoric playfulness.

I am thankful that these two poems led me to other more challenging ones. My mind and body can almost recall (if not relive) that moment in the urgency of language when I discovered "Annabel Lee" and "The Creation," and it seems like this must be what happens when one falls in love the first and last time.

W. S. Merwin—

One great stroke of luck for me, as I came to realize much later, was growing up hearing poetry read aloud from the Bible after breakfast—my parents reading to us, that is, before my sister or I had learned to read. The practice never developed much momentum, and it tailed off like the keeping of most journals, but it left in my ear the sound of my mother's voice (I knew my father's from church) reading psalms. The voice was the same that she used for everything but it was refracted by this remote, resonant, lingering language. I loved that more than I knew at first.

My mother also read poems to my sister and me, and the two that caught me first and have stayed in my mind ever since are "Where Go the Boats?" from Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses (she read us that whole collection many times) and Tennyson's "The Brook." I did not know that I loved those poems, but I would say the lines over to myself, savoring the way they went and their evocation, again and again, of clear images of their flowing streams. We were living then on a side street in Union City, New Jersey, and the thought of those streams and the sounds of the words comprised a pleasure which I had not begun to understand. Some time along in there my mother read the third—very different—poem that would at once assume importance for me then: Browning's "The Pied Piper of Hamlin."

In school years I loved poetry with an indiscriminate appetite rather than true love. I would memorize poems framed on the walls of living rooms—that kind of thing—and jingles in magazines, light verse, passages from the Victorian heavies in the house (Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Tennyson). I wandered through "The Idylls of the King" and got lost in Byron, but can scarcely say I loved them. There was an anthology of The Best Loved Poems of the American People in the house, and I picked through that Fanny Farmer assortment and tried to write poems of my own.

Then in early adolescence four poems caught fire one by one and went on burning. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Blake's "Tyger," and Shelley's "Ode To the West Wind." Such different poems, but they all touched a response that continued to grow and remain new and provide something against which to compare all poetry that followed. Until suddenly I began to hear Shakespeare and Milton, and then "Sailing To Byzantium" had me spellbound. It began with hearing something I wanted to go on hearing.

Richard Wilbur—

There was no road-to-Damascus moment of childhood or adolescence at which poetry suddenly claimed me, but I took solid pleasure, as soon as I encountered them, in Stevenson's poems for children, and Lewis Carroll's brainy nonsense, and the lyric capabilities of Twain's colloquial prose. There was in my parents' house an anthology called Poems of American Patriotism, and I think that such splendid public poems as Whittier's "Barbara Frietchie" so conditioned me that I would never be able to associate poetry with, for instance, breathy personal confidences in free verse. As soon as I could write, I wrote poems from time to time, and I believe that my first experience of an audience came in fifth grade, when Miss Harrison, reading aloud to the class a poem I had written about Columbus, could not help laughing when she came to my phrase, "over the bilious waves."

During my high-school years, I was drawn in all directions. I played the guitar and sang blues songs, and the ballad of Joe Hill, and all the verses of Frankie and Albert. Every aspect of journalism attracted me, and Mencken was one of my heroes. Dada and Surrealism delighted me then as now. As a cartoonist, I thought I might become another Herriman, or William Cotton, or Fitzpatrick. Amidst all these gravitations—and I was soon to get the further notion, at Amherst, of becoming a critic and scholar—I read poetry and sometimes wrote it. I had Frost's Selected, and volumes of Eliot and Joyce, and when I was sixteen my grandmother gave me, by request, Hart Crane's Collected Poems. In college, I met up with Milton and much else.

But it was World War II, and my two years' service abroad as a signalman in the 36th Infantry Division, which simplified me. Poetry is the universal art of soldiers, because it can be done in foxholes and in the head. During my time overseas, every issue of Stars & Stripes contained a "Puptent Poets" column which drew on the better or worse inspirations of thousands of G.I.s. I carried in my musette bag, at one time or another, Tennyson, Hopkins, Poe, and some poetry pamphlets from New Directions. I found also that I carried a slew of poems in my memory, and that they spoke out more powerfully now, giving shape and an utterable sense to the world. Amidst those voices I began to hear my own.

C. K. Williams—

One day in Mexico in the spring of 1963, I was chatting about poetry with my then new and now old friend, the painter Bruce McGrew. I'd been writing poetry, or trying to write poetry, or working towards one day being able to write real poetry for six or seven years. I hadn't published anything yet, and I'd experienced poetry mostly as a labor I'd assigned myself, a task I toiled at, scribbling and studying and constantly thinking, brooding, going crazy about. I'm sure I still hoped that someday there would be a reward for all my fretting, but when that might be seemed so uncertain that I'd essentially come not to think about it any more. On that afternoon in Tlaquepaque, I was telling Bruce about Rilke's Duino Elegies, which I'd been immersed in for months; I began to read aloud from Leishman and Spender's translation of the Eighth Elegy, "With all its eyes the creature world beholds the open...." and was astonished to have a swell of feeling so intense take me that tears filled my eyes and my voice broke, something that had never happened to me before, and I suddenly realized how deeply, without my quite knowing it, poetry had taken my heart, and I knew, too, that this was the compensation I'd been awaiting all these difficult years.

Although I'd started to write poetry at what seemed a terribly late age, nineteen or twenty, I'd actually been reading poetry for most of my life. My father loved poetry; he'd been in the poetry club in high school until he was expelled—apparently for getting into a fight, the details of which my mother would never tell me, even after he had died. Perhaps there was no poetry club in the high school he was sent to after he was expelled, which might explain how limited his taste in poetry was, despite his enthusiasm. When I was small, he used to read me James Whitcomb Riley's children's poems, and John Greenleaf Whittier—I remember "Snow-bound"—then other poems that were popular when he was young; I liked best "The Highwayman" and "Hiawatha." He also used to tell me the Greek myths as bedtime stories, and I've always been grateful to have had those chunks of Homer offered to me at an early age.

Later on, his readings to me, and then my own, were mostly from that old One Hundred and One Famous Poems. I still remember how oddly narrow the book was, printed on a coated paper unlike any I'd come across before; sometimes I may have gone to it as much for its pages' slickness and sweet, oily odor as for the poems, but the poems were there, too. My father encouraged me to memorize, and I did: Longfellow's "Children's Hour," Kilmer's "Trees," and I can't remember, fortunately, what else. I never much liked poetry as it was taught in school, except perhaps "Evangeline," "The Raven," "My Last Duchess," and some slices of Shakespeare.

Still later, when I was fifteen or sixteen and hadn't voluntarily looked at a poem for a long time, I was wandering through a bookstore and came across The Portable Whitman, and—I really can't imagine why now—bought it and spent time in "Leaves of Grass." I'd like to say Whitman's great spirit beckoned me into poetry then, but it wasn't until I'd finished my last required English course my sophomore year in college that I found myself writing poems, quite awful ones; even I knew that. I made my next assigned purchase of a book of poetry Eliot's Waste Land. I've written a poem, "My Mother's Lips," about what happened with that book: how I found myself improvising, declaiming, orating, in a kind of ecstasy, "...what I thought were poems," my own poems, from the window of a pension in Florence. Although in "My Mother's Lips" I didn't mention that I'd been reading Eliot, that was the first experience I had of the way another poet's voice can so gratifyingly take yours and lead you to states of mind and music you'd never have come to otherwise.

From then on, back in college, it was poetry every day. A course in Yeats attached me to his work, especially to the way it progressed over the course of his career. A seminar in close reading with my favorite professor, Morse Peckham, brought me into inspiring proximity to Keats and Shelley; then I found Hopkins, who was so immediately troubling and exalting. Some reading on my own of Rilke, in whatever versions I could find. Then Whitman again, explosively this time, that expansive feeling of having one's own cosmos sung for you. Then Sidney, then Villon....

....And then that day in Mexico, and one could believe one had really begun.