Elegant Article Defending Poetry from the Common Core
Pioneer Institute’s Jamie Gass published an great op-ed on poetry in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette entitled: “Leaves of Memory Going Dark.”
April was National Poetry Month and there’s nowhere that designation should have more meaning than in Massachusetts, where John Adams’ 1780 state constitution explicitly instructs future leaders to “cherish the interests of literature.”
Every region of Massachusetts has produced great poets. Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau lived in Concord, Emily Dickinson lived in prolific seclusion in Amherst, Herman Melville, who wrote Civil War poems, lived in Pittsfield, and Edgar Allan Poe, author of “The Raven” and other creepy tales, was born in Boston.
The Merrimack Valley has been referred to as the “Valley of the Poets” since Puritan author Anne Bradstreet and abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier were buried there. In the Pioneer Valley, Greenfield has Poet’s Seat Tower overlooking the Connecticut River, a site named by the local