everett_reed

"If I have to define poetry, and if I feel rather shaky about it, if I’m not too sure about it, I say something like: 'Poetry is the expression of the beautiful through the medium of words artfully woven together.' This definition may be good enough for a dictionary or a textbook, but we all feel that it is rather feeble. There is something far more important—something that may not only encourage us to go on trying our hand at writing poetry, but enjoying it and feeling that we know all about it.

This is what we know poetry is. We know it so well that we cannot define it in other words, even as we can not define the taste of coffee, the color red or yellow, or the meaning of anger, of love, of hatred, of the sunrise, of the sunset, or of our love for our country. These things are so deep in us that they can be expressed only by those common symbols that we share. So why should we have need of other words?"

Everett Reed received his B.A. from Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas, and his M.A. from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. At Harding he majored in English and became particularly interested in the literature of the South, especially William Faulkner. At St. John’s College he pursued a distinctive Great Books curriculum and found that he greatly enjoyed reading and discussing philosophy. In the summers, Mr. Reed is an M.A. student in the Sewanee School of Letters at the University of the South, and in the coming months, he hopes to unite his interests in literature and philosophy in a thesis on the work of Cormac McCarthy.

Mr. Reed lives in Scottsboro with Melody Rose Reed, his wife of four years. Mrs. Reed works as an RN at Crestwood Hospital in Huntsville. When Mr. Reed allows himself to be pulled away from his books, they enjoy taking walks and traveling to visit old friends.