And Consider This

The Favorite Poem Project was founded in 1997 as an initiative by former Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky. Eighteen thousand Americans shared their favorite poems and a number of those now reside on the Project site's database, such as

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer by Walt Whitman:

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

Or this:

from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection:
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is lead forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

For those of you who have a poem to contribute to the Project, it's not too late to do so.

Poetry in Motion invites readers to create a poem from the selection of words presented at their site. Each entry will be time stamped at the exact second that it is received and each day, a random time (to the second) is chosen for the previous day's entries. The 21 entries closest to the random time are then judged by a panel of editors who select the $100.00 gift certificate winner. Poetry.com also dedicates a section to the '100 Greatest Poems Ever Written.'