The English, Foreign Languages and English as a Second Language Department is pleased to present the Campus Poetry Project to celebrate poets and poetry during National Poetry Month that was established by the Academy of American Poets in 1996 and is celebrated every April.
Special Event: The Academy of American Poets is offering a free, virtual event, entitled “Poets & the Creative Mind 2025,” at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 24. All are welcome to attend! Please click here for more information and to register.
“Hope is the thing with feathers ”
by Emily Dickinson
Please click here to read “Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson.
From The Poetry Foundation: Emily Dickinson (1830—1886) is one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, like those in the works of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barret Browning, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imaginable escapes.
After her death, Dickinson’s family found her hand-sewn books or “fascicles.” These fascicles contained nearly 1,800 poems, though only one letter and 10 of her poems were published during her lifetime, and these were edited significantly to fit conventional poetic rules.
When the first volume of her poetry was published four years after her death, it met with stunning success. Going through 11 editions in less than two years, the poems eventually extended far beyond their first household audiences. Dickinson is now known as one of the most important American poets, and her poetry is widely read among people of all ages and interests. (Photo by Wendy Maeda/The Boston Globe via Getty Images.)
The Campus Poetry Project
Throughout April, be on the lookout for poetry postings in the Campus Chronicle, on digital monitors and on lawn signs across our main campus.
“This Is The World I Want To Live In. The Shared World.”
~ Naomi Shihab Nye
National Poetry Month – April 2025