Committed to Memory is a gathering of the world's best-loved poetry, chosen specifically for its beautiful rhythms of sound, word, and phrase. They are poems to memorize and share with family and friends. Poems to read alone in thoughtful silence. Poems that carry on a timeless tradition kept alive not in libraries but through a cycle of reciting, listening, memorizing, and reciting anew. To hear a poem read aloud by someone who understands it, and who wishes to share that understanding, is to hear the real music of the written word.
The poems in this collection embrace a wide variety of genres, structures, and patterns. From all-time classics like Rudyard Kipling's 'If' and Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' to family favorites like Ernest Lawrence Thayer's 'Casey at the Bat' and Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky,' the poems will engage and delight both young and old. The poets include some of the greatest names in literature -- Shakespeare, Poe, Whitman, Bronte, Hardy, Browning, Cummings, Joyce, Dickinson -- and the selections range from biblical times to the twentieth century.
