Best Loved Poems of the American People. Selected by Hazel Felleman

Best Loved Poems of the American People Selected by Hazel Felleman c1936 Doubleday & Company : New York

A Prayer

Lord, let me live like a Regular Man,
   With Regular friends and true;
Let me play the game on a Regular plan
   And play it all the way through;

Let me win or lose with a Regular smile
   And never be known to whine,
For that is a Regular Fellow's style
   And I want to make it mine!

 from the poem by Berton Braley



This book is a collection of poems put together by Hazel Felleman, who edited the Queries and Answers page of the New York Times Book Review.  Her boss, Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, liked poetry and he set Miss Felleman to work locating poems for readers who might remember only a line or theme of a poem and wrote in for help finding the rest. 

Once upon a time Americans memorized poetry. It was thought that A Fully Furnished Mind should contain a few inspirational, sentimental, maybe even patriotic poems that could be recited or recalled at appropriate moments. Nobody had cell phones in their pockets to rely on. Today, a dead battery puts a serious cramp in the dinner table conversation where a useful quote or poetic phrase is called for.  Back in the day it was not embarrassing for a poem to rhyme.  Memorization is much easier with a little rhythm and rhyme going for you.  Poems could say simple things like "A smile is better than a frown", and still get published. This book is a collection of poems that were popular in 1935. It is a bit of a time capsule, a pretty hefty time capsule at 670 pages. You may locate Over the Hill to the Poor-House or The Charge of the Light Brigade and allow a young person to sit up on a literary booster seat at Thanksgiving dinner all at once. 

I left the bookmarks intact in the picture of this book.  It was my mother's copy, and some of those mark her favorites.  It was hard for me to realize that a large collection of Americans favorite poetry did not include anything by Robert Frost. No Stopping by Woods?  Many of the poems are by authors unknown, but like old folk songs, they have a life beyond the latest new thing. These are poems loved by regular people with regular themes like love, friendship, faith, home, childhood, nature, beauty, and grief. This volume has a place on the family bookshelf. Learn a few of the poems and be prepared for power outages. A poetry outage is unthinkable.