A Poet
If I could be brave enough and live long enough I could crawl inside the life of every man, woman and child in America. After I had gone within them I could be born out of them. I could become something the like of which has never been seen before. We would see then what America is like.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 22, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“A Poet” was published in Sherwood Anderson’s second volume of poetry, A New Testament (Boni and Liveright, 1927). About the poem, scholar Winfield Scott Lenox writes in his essay “The Significance of Sherwood Anderson’s Poetry,” published by Loyola University Chicago (1961), “In a short poem titled ‘[A] Poet,’ he very strongly expressed this desire to identify himself with the people who surrounded him. Because it was his feeling that ‘the secret of America lies in enough tales,’ he searched unceasingly for new stories to tell in the hope that in his telling them he might help to reveal people to themselves and to each other.”
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson was born in Ohio in 1876. A writer of poetry, fiction, and plays, he published two books of verse, A New Testament (Boni and Liveright, 1927) and Mid-American Chants (John Lane Company, 1918).
Anderson died on March 8, 1941, in Colón, Panama.