Good poems are instantly recognizable. They startle, shock new life into old ideas, impress on the mind patterns of beauty and truth previously unnoticed. Often, as John Keats wrote, they “strike the reader as the wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
Every year, birthday to birthday, I chose a poem of my year. I have been doing this since my 38th birthday so I now have 52 of them and I am thinking of publishing in a very small edition for family and friends an anthology of these poems for my 90th birthday next year. They all must be good poems because they have stood the hard test of time and I like none of them less than I did at the time of choosing and some of them even more. Good poems reveal themselves fully only after many readings.
