April is the gateway to spring and also, appropriately, National Poetry Month. Poetry is a high art and an enormously important part of the Western intellectual tradition, but I must confess that, although I have a few favorite poets, I never became a dedicated reader. We were made to study poems at school, and to memorize and recite popular examples from an ancient book called Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. This was a painful experience for young boys, especially when the verses were of a romantic nature, as they often were. Being compelled to read them out loud was acutely embarrassing, and I doubt whether one in a hundred of my schoolmates ever looked at a poem again. But I did enjoy the rhythms and the rhymes and appreciated the fact that, unlike dates in history or formula in mathematics, poems were easy to remember. Some of those lilting verses have stayed in my head forever, like old familiar songs. “I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills.” Yes, it’s