What shall I do, give you only Bryant out of all of our poets? And not let you have John Greenleaf Whittier, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, or Oliver Wendell Holmes—to say nothing of the two greatest geniuses of them all, Edgar Allen Poe and Walt Whitman! If I could take but one of these I think it would be Whittier, because he is the simplest, most direct, most homely and American. He is to us what Bobby Burns is to Scotland. If there is a single American who doesn’t know “Snow bound” and “The barefoot boy,” and “Telling the bees,” he ought to be given a day in solitary confinement so as to catch up with his needs. Whittier was a Quaker, and, consequently, a fighter, ardent in his support of the Union in the Civil War. His “Barbara Frietchie” is the best ballad to come out of that awful conflict. We were all on one or the other side in that bitter time. There is no side now, thank heaven, but one glorious land, one national soul, one literature giving it life and form and color. You will all say, “Why not take Longfellow?” We will if you say so. He certainly is America’s favorite poet. I remember when he died in 1882. I grew up on him. “Tell me not in mournful numbers” must have been read to me in my cradle. Read again for this course, “Hymn to the night,” “A psalm of life,” “Paul Revere’s ride” (if you cannot already recite them from memory); and besides these, you should read “Evangeline” and “Hiawatha,” two of our long poems, one a story, the other an allegorical interpretation of the Indian, which are as fresh today as on the day they were published. By asking you to read so many poems from so many poets I have made the exclusive selection of one poet’s work impossible. I am going to escape by taking a collection of the best of all of them. There are any number of good American anthologies, such as AMERICAN POEMS (1625-1892) _Edited by W. C. Bronson_ and _American poetry_ edited by Percy H. Boynton[2]. Both of these books have good notes and I am recommending the Bronson because I happen to be better acquainted with it, and because I think its notes fit very well into this reading scheme. This collection does not include any of our recent poetry, which is really in a class by itself and can best be had in such anthologies as Untermeyer’s _Modern American poetry_[3]. I hate to leave this subject of poetry, for I have left unmentioned the three most original, most daring, most gifted of them all, Whitman, Emerson and Poe. I will take just space enough to mention two poems of each of these that everyone should know: “The problem” and “Days” by Emerson; “The haunted palace” and “The conqueror worm” by Poe; “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking” and “Come up from the fields, Father” by Whitman.