Today’s poem comes from one of America’s most beloved and decorated poets, Richard Wilbur. Don’t be put off by the title; no matter the subject, Wilbur’s poetry is always so marvelously companionable– desert island reading if ever there was. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe...
For the day that only comes ‘round once every four years, we have a haunting poem about missed connections–and from a poet with a “Leap Day” birthday, no less. Howard Nemerov was born on February 29, 1920, in New York, New York. Throughout World War II, he served as a pilot in the Royal Canadian unit of the U. S. Army Air Force. He married in 1944, and after the war, having earned the rank of first lieutenant, returned to New York with his wife to complete his first book. Nemerov was first hired...
Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard (1823-1902) was a poet, fiction writer, and essayist born and raised in Mattapoisset, Massachusetts. The daughter of a shipbuilder, Stoddard was educated at Wheaton Female Seminary. She married poet Richard Stoddard in 1851 and together they had three children, two of whom died as infants. The Stoddards’ New York City home was a gathering place for local poets, and Elizabeth began to submit her own poetry, fiction, and social commentary to journals. From 1854 to 1...
Happy Birthday to America’s great man of letters, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow! Get to know Longfellow better through his own verse , or in the pages of Nicholas Basbanes’ excellent biography, Cross of Snow . This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe...
Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in Head Tide, Maine on December 22, 1869 (the same year as W. B. Yeats). His family moved to Gardiner, Maine, in 1870, which renamed “Tilbury Town,” became the backdrop for many of Robinson’s poems. Robinson described his childhood as stark and unhappy; he once wrote in a letter to Amy Lowell that he remembered wondering why he had been born at the age of six. After high school, Robinson spent two years studying at Harvard University as a special student and his...
Today’s classic poem from W. B. Yeats doubles as one of the greatest literary justifications for committing poems to memory. Happy reading! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Today’s poems pay tribute to the soulful and spirited Edna St. Vincent Millay, first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. They are “First Fig,” “Second Fig,” and “Thursday,” all from her collection, A Few Figs From Thistles . Poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892. In 1912, Millay entered her poem “Renascence” to The Lyric Year’ s poetry contest, where she won fourth place and publication in the anthology. This brought her immediate a...
In today’s poem one great poet pays passionate tribute to another. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
The full title of today’s poem from Maurice Manning says it all: “A Brief Refutation of the Rumor That I Allowed Willie and Tad to Relieve Themselves in my Up-Turned Hat on a Sunday Morning at the Office While Their Mother was Attending Religious Services” Maurice Manning (born 1966) is an American poet. His first collection of poems, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions , was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Award, chosen by W.S. Merwin. Since then he has published four collections of poetry (with Ho...
James Matthew Wilson has published ten books, among them four collections of poems, including The Strangeness of the Good . His poems, essays, and reviews appear regularly in a wide range of magazines and journals. The winner of the 2017 Hiett Prize from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, Wilson also serves as Poet-in-Residence of the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Worship, poetry editor of Modern Age magazine, and series editor of Colosseum Books, a new imprint ...
Today’s poem comes from Rilke and has a fairly straight-forward title–or does it? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Today’s poem from Ben Jonson (also know by its first line, “Drink to me only with thine eyes”) has been arranged and set to music numerous times, and become so familiar that it is often recognizable even to those who no longer associate it with Jonson himself. Jonson’s circle of admirers and friends, who called themselves the “Tribe of Ben,” met regularly at the Mermaid Tavern and later at the Devil’s Head. Among his followers were nobles such as the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle, as well as wri...
Today’s poem from Pablo Neruda is characteristic of the passionate Chilean’s emphatic love poetry, but more chaste and decorous than some of his verses–perfect for a day that somehow manages to celebrate romance and the beheading of an Italian saint simultaneously. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe...
Today’s poem comes from a young John Donne. Long before he became a serious clergyman writing Holy Sonnets for God, he was a young rake writing saucy sophistries like this one for the ladies. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Today’s poems kick off a week of love poetry with two by the Master. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was a Fireside Poet, journalist, and nature writer with ties to the Hudson River School of art. He wrote poems, essays, and articles that championed the rights of slaves, workers, and immigrants, and he was frequently published by the North American Review. He is the author of several books, including The White-Footed Deer and Other Poems (I. S. Platt, 1844), and The Fountain and Other Poems (Wiley and Putnam, 1842). - bio via Academy of American Poets This is a...
Today’s poem is a rare departure for Elizabeth Bishop who usually avoided a confessional style of poetry–but everybody gets a little introspective on their birthday. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. From 1997 to 1999 she held a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University. Smith is the author of four books of poetry: The Body's Question (2003), which won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet; Duende (2007), winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essense Literary Award; Life on Mars (20...
Today’s poem is the one you had to read in high school without really understanding it. (Or was that just me?) Among the major Victorian writers, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is unique in that his reputation rests equally upon his poetry and his poetry criticism. Only a quarter of his productive life was given to writing poetry, but many of the same values, attitudes, and feelings that are expressed in his poems achieve a fuller or more balanced formulation in his prose . This unity was obscured f...
Today’s poem is one of the most recognizable and influential American poems of the twentieth century. Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idea...
Today’s poem from Robert Herrick is not only an ode to the holiday of Candlemas, but a meditation on the everlasting revolution of the seasons. For more on the history of Groundhog Day and Candlemas, check out this conversation between Richard Rohlin and Jonathan Pageau . This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe...
If you had to live the same day over and over again, you may as well use the time to memorize some poetry. That’s exactly what Phil Connors does in Groundhog Day . Today’s poem is featured in the film and marks a significant turning point for the once-misanthropic weatherman. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the premier poet-critic of modern English tradition, distinguished for the scope and influence of his thinking about literature as much as for his innovative verse. Active in the wake of the Frenc...
Although the early part of Robert Browning’s creative life was spent in comparative obscurity, he has come to be regarded as one of the most important English poets of the Victorian period. His dramatic monologues and the psycho-historical epic The Ring and the Book (1868-1869), a novel in verse, have established him as a major figure in the history of English poetry. His claim to attention as a children’s writer is more modest, resting as it does almost entirely on one poem, “ The Pied Piper of...
Today’s poem from Emily Dickinson is a masterclass in poetic economy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Anne Bradstreet was the first woman to be recognized as an accomplished New World Poet. Her volume of poetry The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America ... received considerable favorable attention when it was first published in London in 1650. Eight years after it appeared it was listed by William London in his Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England , and George III is reported to have had the volume in his library. Bradstreet's work has endured, and she is still considered to be one o...
Today’s poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, though potentially universal in its application, is ostensibly about Daniel Webster, who alienated abolitionists with his support of the Fugitive Slave Bill in 1850. Whittier (December 17, 1807 – September 7, 1892) was an American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Frequently listed as one of the fireside poets, he was influenced by the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Whittier is remembered particularly for his anti-sla...
Today’s poem is Dana Gioia’s interpretive spin on a Rilke poem about (among other things) poetics. Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed poet and writer. Former California Poet Laureate and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia was born in Los Angeles of Italian and Mexican descent. The first person in his family to attend college, he received a B.A. and M.B.A. from Stanford and an M.A. from Harvard in Comparative Literature. For fifteen years he worked as a businessman bef...
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), and also The Bell Jar , a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was ...
John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children. Although he died at the age of twenty-five, Keats had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet. He published only fifty-four poems, in three slim volumes and a few magazines. But over his short development he took on the challenges of a wide range of poetic forms from the sonnet, to the Spenserian romance, to the Miltonic epic, defining anew their possibilities with hi...
Poet Christina Rossetti was born in 1830, the youngest child in an extraordinarily gifted family. Her father, the Italian poet and political exile Gabriele Rossetti, immigrated to England in 1824 and established a career as a Dante scholar and teacher of Italian in London. He married the half-English, half-Italian Frances Polidori in 1826, and they had four children in quick succession: Maria Francesca in 1827, Gabriel Charles Dante (famous under the name Dante Gabriel but always called Gabriel ...
