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Without a doubt, since yesterday’s announcement, everyone has been scrambling to read more poetry. Why is April National Poetry Month? It was started arbitrarily by The Academy of American Poets who chose April for this reason: “With input from booksellers, librarians, poets, and teachers, the Academy chose a month during the school year so that schools and students could participate fully.” Sexy.
But the Academy also points out that April makes some interesting appearances in poetry. While spring may make some people throw on a tank top and go skipping through a field of wildflowers while licking an ice-cream cone, others just find it a bit depressing. Some stunning examples are in T.S. Eliot‘s “The Waste Land,” when he writes, “April is the cruelest month,” and in “Spring,” where Edna St. Vincent Millay writes, “April/Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.”