The Best of American Poetry and Literature: With Commentary and Original Work by Benjamin Mester

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The poet, Rumi, once said:

I am burning.
If anyone lacks tinder,
let him set his rubbish ablaze with my fire.

And so, the fire has gone out from poet to reader ever since. Of all the literature and poetry of the English language, none is more ablaze with the fire of passion than the writings of early America, which contained a magical spirit of newness and adventure etched in its very pages. When visiting the prairies for the first time, the poet William Cullen Bryant was overwhelmed by their vastness, none from the old world ever having witnessed such a sight, and said:

These are the gardens of the Desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name.

So much that was to happen in early America was something new, a thing for which the speech of England yet had no name. A new form of government which had never been tried was overseeing a new blending of peoples who explored new places and formed new ways of living never before attempted. As Thoreau said in the opening pages of Walden:

Man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.

The poems and writings contained in this book are not those you'll be quick to find filling the nearly endless volumes and collections of every bookstore and library – those poems which speak to the mind of the academic more than the heart of the common person. The poems and writings in this book are those which have a true fire to impart to the longing soul. As you read the pages of this volume, allow your thinking to expand, and your heart to long for a greater measure of life than you have thus far lived.

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any absolute and permanent existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of reality.Thoreau

Table of Contents

1) Introduction to Walden
2) Walden by Henry David Thoreau
3) The Life of Inspiration
4) Introduction to Poetry
5) Edna St Vincent Millay
6) Sara Teasdale
7) Robert Frost
8) William Cullen Bryant
9) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
10) John Greenleaf Whittier
11) Benjamin Mester