When I was in the sixth grade, I read my first full book of poetry (I don’t count A Child’s Garden of Verses by R.L. Stevenson because my grandmother read pretty much all of that to me a number of times before I read it for myself). It was a book by Stephen Vincent Benet and his wife Rosemary Carr called, aptly enough, A Book of Americans. There are poems about many famous Americans, most of of them legendary figures like Johnny Appleseed and Daniel Boone. But Benet also includes unusual choices – interesting historical figures like Nancy Hanks and James Buchanan. The book affected me profoundly because I read it for comfort in the days after President Kennedy’s assassination. Lines from the poems still haunt me and pop into my mind at odd moments: