Poetry and the life force within

When I was in grad school at Michigan, I'd make the drive from Ann Arbor to Virginia a few times a year - usually with my 2 cats miserably accompanying me for the 8 hour journey. One trip I stopped at a rest stop and looked at the books on tape to try to make the trip go faster. I picked up the book on tape: And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran (Read by Andre Gregory.) The story was riveting, and I think that listening to that was the fastest 8 hours of driving I'll ever experience. I was upset when I got home before I got to the end. I am not sure how many hours the tape was, but it was an amazing story: a young french boy, blinded from an injury at school at the age of 7, (he hit his head on a desk) went on to create a youth resistance group in France during WWII. In 1943 he was betrayed and captured by the Nazi's and was sent to Buchenwald.
I was blown away by his writing, it was profound and inspiring. His way of describing and sensing things was enhanced by his blindness and life experiences.
Over the years I have thought of that book, and have tried to remember who it was about and what the title was, but then I would forget and move on to something else.
Recently I was talking to one of our vendors about our mutual interest in WWII history and I told him that I have always been interested in the history of the holocaust. I've wanted to understand the inconceivable: what made society disolve and turn into hell on earth? Why were some heroes, resistance fighters, rescuers, and most others collaborators and participants? I have also always been interested in spys and the underground resistance movements too. I mentioned this autobiography that I have never forgotten about a French blind resistance fighter who ended up in a concentration camp. I thought I remembered that "Light" was in the title.
After our conversation, armed with those memories, I went on google and immediately found the book. (Amazing what we can do on the Internet!) I also found a collection of Lusseyran's writings called Against the Pollution of the I: Selected Writings of Jacques Lusseyran which I also bought.
I have read the essays, and some I will have to re-read, because they are so layered and intense.
One that really affected me was the essay titled Poetry in Buchenwald. A (too simple) gist of the essay is that one of the things that energized and gave him (and others) hope and life force in the concentration camp, was reciting poetry and hearing others recite poetry. Not poetry by pessimists, he noted, but poetry by people he thought were particularly honest and human. I don't know if I know any poems well enough to ever recite them from memory, but perhaps if it was important enough to me I could dredge them up. (Emily Dickinson, maybe, I read so much of her poetry when I was younger.)
I'm not doing his essay justice, you'll just have to read it, but it has made me ashamed that I no longer take the time to read poetry, to seek it out. We live in such impatient times now, poetry takes leisure and thoughtful attention. Here is the list of poets he thought were particularly effective for sustaining the will to live:

• Victor Hugo
  
• Baudelaire
  
• Villon
  
• Ronsard
  
• Verlaine
  
• Apollinaire
  
• Aragon
  

I don't know if I'll find all of those poets, and in the end it doesn't matter, I'll find the ones that speak to me. I've always felt I need to read Rilke (here or here,) and now maybe that will give me the impetus to make it happen and include more poetry in my life.
Lusseyran ends his essay quoting himself: "Man is nourished by the invisible. Man is nourished by that which is beyond the personal. He dies from preferring their opposites."