Five years ago during National Poetry Month, the Academy of American Poets reached out to late Congressman and Civil Rights leader John Lewis, among other public figures, to ask him to share his favorite lines of poetry.
Congressman Lewis mailed back his response on his official letterhead:
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
These are the last two lines of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats, a poem that remarks on truth, and truth revealed in art, that’s everlasting.