P.S. Poet Stamps

Yes, it’s true.

The United States Post Office likes poetry.  They like poetry so much that they have designed stamps to immortalize ten great 20th century poets.

If you’re like us, the romanticism of writing “old fashioned” letters has not been lost.  Perhaps we are the last generation to consider paying almost half a dollar to send a crisply folded piece of yesterday’s history into the future. If so, we’re sure you’ll feel comforted to know that your new correspondence stock will be ushered through the United States Postal Service with the…ahem…stamp of approval from Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, E. E. Cummings, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.

In one TSHS member’s awe and covetousness, she departed the Post Office with two sheets of twenty Twentieth-Century Poets (Forever).  After coming home, she turned the sheets over to see snippets of some of their best-loved poems. Ah, summer, ah letters! Here’s to your letter writing on bright blue days and nights full of cicadas:

***
This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold