The American Scholar's Next Line, Please contest continues with a crowd-sourced five-line acrostic poem. Here's how David Lehman introduced the contest:
We are going to write an acrostic based on an epigraph. The poem will have five lines when complete. The first letters of the lines, read vertically, shall spell out “Waldo,” the middle name of the man who wrote the essay from which this distinguished journal takes it name. That’s the acrostic part. The poem’s epigraph is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”: “I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.”
Lehman has just selected the penultimate line. Read the acrostic to date and enter your proposed final line over at the American Scholar.