April 14-15, 2012: Taxing Poems

To round out the week of National Poetry Month posts, and in honor of tax day, here are five poems that will tax your powers of interpretation—but that pay high dividends if you allow yourself to be taxed. (And no, I won’t be saying anything about them—that’d be cheating!)

Anne Bradstreet, “Prologue” (1650)

Philip Freneau, “The Indian Burying Ground” (1787)

Emily Dickinson, “441” (c.1865)

Robert Hayden, “Middle Passage” (1962)

Kenneth Goldsmith, “Two poems from ‘The Day’” (2001)

Next series this coming week,

Ben

PS. Any poets or poems that tax you (in the best sense)?

4/14 Memory Day nominee: Anne Sullivan, the titular “Miracle Worker” without whose impressive perserverance and educational efforts Helen Keller might never have become the inspiring American she did.

4/15 Memory Day nominees: A tie between three very distinct and equally interesting and significant American men: Charles Willson Peale, Henry James, and A. Philip Randolph.