"Mr. Field found his calling by happenstance. As a newly enlisted soldier boarding a troop train during World War II, he was handed a bag..."

"... by a Red Cross worker. It contained a toothbrush, a comb, a candy bar and an anthology of poetry. 'I was on that train for three days,' he said in a 2022 interview for this obituary. 'I read it over and over. I knew immediately that I was going to be a poet. He was just 18 and had never read a book of poetry...."

From "Edward Field, Bohemian New York Poet, Dies at 102/His colloquial language, emotionality and gay topics brought him widespread praise, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and other literary honors" (NYT gift link).

I'd like to see that anthology. It seems that the book was "The Pocket Book of Verse: Great English and American Poems," which contained 249 poems by 77 poets:

There are inspirational poems like Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” and Richard Lovelace’s “To Althea, From Prison.”... There are inspirational passages from The Bible, like the famous Psalm 23.... There are poems about soldiers like Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” and Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and Sir Walter Scott’s “Soldier, Rest”.... There are escapist stories in poem form like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee” and Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman” and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”.... There are poems about what it is to be a man like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Grief” and Robert Burns’s “A Man’s a Man for A’That” and Rudyard Kipling’s “If”.... There are romantic poems like Shakespeare’s and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets and Wordsworth’s “Perfect Woman.” Here’s an excerpt: 

The reason firm, the temperate will,

Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;

A perfect Woman, nobly planned,

To warn, to comfort, and command;

And yet a Spirit still, and bright

With something of angelic light.