As a kid in the 1970s, even one attending private schools, I was directed to drive by poetry slowly now and then, but rarely to actually stop and take it in deeply. Today, while vanishingly few people are up for reciting poems such as Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” or Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” vast numbers can eagerly and effortlessly recite hip-hop lyrics. But true verse of the kind featured in hip-hop — poetry that does not rely on melody or harmony — centers the word alone. In contrast to the synergy of song and word, verse is an especially heightened form of language alone. Rap is verse poetry, in all of its verbal richness and rhythmic variety, a deft stylization of speech into art.

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Persons: ’, doughty, W.E.B, Du Bois, Louis Untermeyer’s, Gioia, Pushkin, “ Oppenheimer, Barbie, Joyce Kilmer’s Organizations: ., America, Light Brigade