Joyce kilmer poet biography assignments

• Joyce Kilmer wrote one of the most famous%2C most beloved%2C most parodied poems
• His ode to trees is known by almost everyone%2C critic said
• But rote memorization of poetry is on the way out in schools

MAHWAH, N.J.

— Your hands were wet, your mouth was dry. It had taken days to memorize, and now you had to stand — in front of the entire class! — and deliver.

And so you recited:

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree…

So begins Joyce Kilmer's Trees, the most famous, most beloved, most parodied American poem of the 20th century.

It was memorized and recited by generations of students, from prep school to reformatory.

It comforted troops in the trenches of World War I. It was set to music and set in stone, declaimed in opera houses and vaudeville theaters, intoned at ceremonies each April on Arbor Day.

It was, the critic Guy Davenport said, "the one poem known by practically everybody."

It is a