RIP Christopher Hitchens

In the April 2005 issue of Poetry magazine, Hitchens wrote about the poems he knew "by heart." In keeping with his style, the piece tackles a personal subject without sentimentality or mawkishness. He will be missed:

My own acquaintance and relationship with poetry is bound up with acquisition, memorization, and recital. That is: I realized when I was quite young that I could learn poems "by heart," as the saying goes. This may have something to do with early experience in compulsory religious and scriptural studies. It was no hardship for me to commit hymns and verses of the Bible (though not so many psalms, oddly enough) to memory. Furthermore, I found that this fairly simple attainment could, as well as give me satisfaction, win me praise. This helped make up for my almost dyslexic inability to read music, or to play a note on any instrument. And, when it came to poetry, I would squirm at the embarrassed clumsiness with which my classmates "read" beautiful lines that they obviously felt were effeminate by definition.

Read the whole thing here.