I’m not a poetry fan. I trudged through Browning, Donne, and Frost in high school. I even stumbled my way through Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus.” I hated every minute of it.

Extended metaphors, alliteration, free verse, and onomatopoeia: such is the stuff of my frustration. I just don’t get it.

But there’s one poet whose words electrify me. A scribe of power and joy. A bard of the working class.

Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics resonate with my sense of the world. They turn life’s great challenges into hope. They’re an anthem for all of us with big dreams we refuse to let go.

“Born To Run” is Springsteen’s greatest album, a young man’s story of breaking free from his dead hometown. In “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” he recounts the formation of his E Street Band. “Thunder Road” invites a young woman to forget her fears and join him in living. The title song, “Born To Run,” promises that, while we may “sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream,” we will someday “get to that place where we really want to go and we’ll walk in the sun.”

I’m always struck by Springsteen’s mastery of language. He opens the album talking of a woman who “dances across the porch as the radio plays.” He sings about “mansions of glory” and “suicide machines.” He says that although “the night’s busted open these two lanes will take us anywhere.”

I know “Born To Run” backwards and forwards, I’ve listened to it hundreds of times. But every time it comes up on my iPod, my pulse starts racing and my heart starts dreaming.

-Nathaniel French

Opinion Editor