A little over a decade ago, I arrived at college. I was crazy about poetry, in the way that many teenage girls are craz…A little over a decade ago, I arrived at college. I was crazy about poetry, in the way that many teenage girls are crazy about poetry. My sentiments toward poetry were similar to the sentiments Horace expresses toward the sea god Poseidon in his "Ode to Pyrrha": I felt that poetry had, in a very personal and somewhat obscure way, saved my life, saved my sanity. To me, poetry was a sort of magnanimous taciturn Greek god who had ripped me out of the teeth of a hurricane and carried me to safety, and my natural duty was to be henceforth devoted to its practice. I considered myself a kind of devotee, a kind of temple vestal, charged with reading and writing and proselytizing about poetry.Looking back, I was also woefully illiterate. Sure, I had done well in my high-school English classes, and I had read a slew of classic novels for pleasure during my childhood and teen years. But what did I really know in those days about poetry, the field that I claimed to be devoted to? The sparse morsels I had gathered from Louis Untermeyer's Treasury of Favorite Poems, bought from the "Bargain Books" section of my local suburban Barnes and Noble store. Scraps of Pablo Neruda's work, which had been recommended to me by a free-spirited boyfriend. Bits and pieces of Arthur Rimbaud and Guillaume Apollinaire, scavenged from paperback anthologies. Contemporary poetry was a cipher to me. The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome was a mystery to me.The freshman-year roommate that my university had assigned to me was named Sara. "Oh, do you love poetry? I love poetry, too!" she effused. I noticed that she spoke the word "love" without hesitation or shyness: she was a gregarious girl of Italian ethnicity who overflowed with personality. Having been raised by a Vietnamese …