What do parents want most for their children? Life—in all its fullness and flourishing, that they might live in the best way and experience the best things. Well, poetry opens the eyes, sets the hair on end, and makes the fingertips tingle with sensation: It opens us to the world and the world to us, refining our emotional life and training our eyes to see what we would otherwise miss. This is one reason parents should read poetry to their children.
I can still hear the warm, measured voice of my father as he read a T.S. Eliot poem to the family after dinner one night. “Let us go then, you and I/ When the evening is spread out against the sky.” The poem entranced me, enchanting my mind in the beautiful labyrinth of the words, words that were mysterious and urgent and sad and funny all at the same time. I didn’t understand much about the poem—it’s one I puzzle over to this day—but I felt I’d encountered a work of genius, a poem that spoke to me on a level that I hadn’t known existed.
