One more week to vote for America’s favorite poem

Trying to create some hoopla around the publication of their new anthology, The Oxford Book of American Poetry (edited by David Lehman), Oxford University Press is asking people to choose America’s favorite from 10 poems selected by Lehman as the most popular American poems ever written. We delayed posting the announcement in hope that OUP would repair the Web page for voting -- the popup windows that are intended to display each of the 10 poems when you click on the title come up blank. But Matt Sollars of OUP has posted the text of some of the poems on their blog, and this is the last week for voting. So if you don’t already know the poems, we suggest you use our step-by-step directions for finding poem texts, and choose your favorite from among these:

• “My Life had stood --a Loaded Gun--,” by Emily Dickinson
• “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T. S. Eliot
• “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” by Robert Frost
• “Harlem/Montage of a Dream Deferred,” by Langston Hughes
• “The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus
• “What Are Years?,” by Marianne Moore
• “The Raven,” by Edgar Allan Poe
• “Sunday Morning,” by Wallace Stevens
• “Song of Myself,” by Walt Whitman
• “To Elsie,” by William Carlos Williams

Sollars says that “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is currently leading the voting. The poem that wins the distinction of being “America’s Favorite Poem” will be announced on May 1st.