Today’s Poem: To Helen

Poe feels right, even when he’s wrong

Henry Hintermeister, Helen of Troy [also and confusedly titled Beauty of ancient Rome], 1929 (Wikimedia Commons)

You know how it starts. Anyone with even the vaguest sense of the old canon of English poetry in American high-school literature textbooks knows how it starts: “Helen, thy beauty is to me / Like those Nicean barks of yore,” in “To Helen” by Ed…