Poetry

In a conversation the other day with Rachel, I told her that Gran Mitchells favorite poet was Walt Whitman and she was shocked because she had just read a very lengthy poem for her lit class by that self same author. She said it seemed a bit risque for my Grandmother to be reading. Gran was a renaissance woman and just loved good literature and poetry. Then I began looking at his works and trying to see what it was she would have loved. My, he wrote over 300 poems and many of them would suit her. Besides the obvious "O Captain, My Captain"
there is one Joey would like, called "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and one I always enjoyed, "I Hear America Singing" and then of course his "Leaves of Grass" poems.
That set me looking for some of her other 'favorites' which included James Whitcomb Riley. I have her set of his works but I will say I seldom ever opened any but volume 5. That holds "Lil Orphan Annie", "The Raggedy Man" and others of his dialectical poems, that I grew up reading and reciting. Then I realized he wrote a whole host of other things using proper grammer and english words.
Then there is Ralph Waldo Emerson, Longfellow, and the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote "House of Seven Gables" and "The Scarlet Letter".
She also admired John Greenleaf Whittier, probably more for his abolitionist stance than for his works, but she read him, too.
Perhaps there is a literature gene at work in this family.
Anyway, I will be interested in the progress of the lit class Rachel is taking and seeing where it takes them. Gran would be smiling to know Rachel thought the poem a bit much for a woman of that time. And she would be pleased to know that the current generation enjoys some of the same literature she enjoyed. It sort of makes a connection spanning the years.
Yes, Gran was a learned woman and enjoyed learning throughout her life. Maybe that is an inherited gene, too.