The Daily Poem

Today’s poem offers a recipe for domestic bliss. 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

Though we remember Browning far more readily than we do Landor, this poem dates from a period when their fortunes were reversed and the latter was eager to acquaint the world with the budding talent he had discovered.Walter Savage Landor (30 January 1775 – 17 September 1864) was an English writer, poet, and activist. His best known works were the prose Imaginary Conversations, and the poem "Rose Aylmer," but the critical acclaim he received from contemporary poets and reviewers was not matched by public popularity. As remarkable as his work was, it was equalled by his rumbustious character and lively temperament. Both his writing and political activism, such as his support for Lajos Kossuth and Giuseppe Garibaldi, were imbued with his passion for liberal and republican causes. He befriended and influenced the next generation of literary reformers such as Charles Dickens and Robert Browning.-bio via Wikipedia 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 is a defense of myths and myth-making, inspired by an argument with C. S. Lewis. 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

Ronald Stuart Thomas (29 March 1913 – 25 September 2000), published as R. S. Thomas, was a Welsh poet and Anglican priest noted for nationalism, spirituality and dislike of the anglicisation of Wales. John Betjeman, introducing Song at the Year's Turning (1955), the first collection of Thomas's poetry from a major publisher, predicted that Thomas would be remembered long after he himself was forgotten. M. Wynn Thomas said: "He was the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of Wales because he was such a troubler of the Welsh conscience. He was one of the major English language and European poets of the 20th century."-bio via Wikipedia 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

Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet and writer of fiction, plays and screenplays based in New York; she was known for her caustic wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary works published in magazines, such as The New Yorker, and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics resulted in her being placed on the Hollywood blacklist.Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker". Nevertheless, both her literary output and reputation for sharp wit have endured. Some of her works have been set to music.-bio via Wikipedia 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 offers a needful portrait of ‘manly talk.’ Happy reading.Louis Untermeyer was the author, editor or compiler, and translator of more than 100 books for readers of all ages. He will be best remembered as the prolific anthologist whose collections have introduced students to contemporary American poetry since 1919. The son of an established New York jeweler, Untermeyer’s interest in poetry led to friendships with poets from three generations, including many of the century’s major writers. His tastes were eclectic. In the Washington Post, Martin Weil related that Untermeyer once “described himself as ‘a bone collector’ with ‘the mind of a magpie.’” He was a liberal who did much to allay the Victorian myth that poetry is a highbrow art. “What most of us don’t realize is that everyone loves poetry,” he was quoted by Weil as saying, pointing out the rhymes on the once-ubiquitous Burma Shave road signs as an example.Untermeyer developed his taste for literature while a child. His mother had read aloud to him from a variety of sources, including the epic poems “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “Hiawatha.” Bedtime stories he told to his brother Martin combined elements from every story he could remember, he revealed in Bygones: The Recollections of Louis Untermeyer. When he learned to read for himself, he was particularly impressed by books such as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Dante’s Inferno. Gustave Dore’s illustrations in these books captivated him and encouraged his imagination toward fantasy. Almost 50 years later, Untermeyer published several volumes of retold French fairy tales, all illustrated by the famous French artist.In addition to children’s books and anthologies, Untermeyer published collections of his own poetry. He began to compose light verse and parodies during his teen years after dropping out of school to join his father’s business. With financial help from his father, he published First Love in 1911. Sentiments of social protest expressed in the 1914 volume Challenge received disapproval from anti-communist groups 40 years later; as a result of suspicion, Untermeyer lost his seat on the “What’s My Line” game show panel to publisher Bennett Cerf. During the 1970s, he found himself “instinctively, if incongruously, allied with the protesting young,” he wrote in the New York Times. In the same article he encouraged the spirit of experiment that characterized the decade, saying, “it is the non-conformers, the innovators in art, science, technology, and human relations who, misunderstood and ridiculed in their own times, have shaped our world.” Untermeyer, who did not promote any particular ideology, remained a popular speaker and lecturer, sharing criticism of poetry and anecdotes about famous poets with audiences in the United States and as far away as India and Japan.Untermeyer resigned from the jewelry business in 1923 in order to give all his attention to literary pursuits. Friendships with Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Arthur Miller, and other literary figures provided him with material for books. For example, The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer contains letters selected from almost 50 years of correspondence with the New England poet. The anthologist’s autobiographies From Another World and Bygones relate as much about other writers as they do about his personal life. Bygones provides his reflections on the four women who were his wives. Jean Starr moved to Vienna with Untermeyer after he became a full-time writer; Virginia Moore was his wife for about a year; Esther Antin, a lawyer he met in Toledo, Ohio, married him in 1933; 15 years later, he married Bryna Ivens, with whom he edited a dozen books for children.In his later years, Untermeyer, like Frost, had a deep appreciation for country life. He once told Contemporary Authors: “I live on an abandoned farm in Connecticut … ever since I found my native New York unlivable as well as unlovable. … On these green and sometimes arctic acres I cultivate whatever flowers insist on growing in spite of my neglect; delight in the accumulation of chickadees, juncos, cardinals, and the widest possible variety of songless sparrows; grow old along with three pampered cats and one spoiled cairn terrier; season my love of home with the spice of annual travel, chiefly to such musical centers as Vienna, Salzburg, Milan, and London; and am always happy to be home again.” Untermeyer died in 1977.-bio via Poetry Foundation 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 is one of the most-discussed pieces of twentieth-century verse and, love it or hate it, features one of literature’s best extended metaphors for eternal yearnings–the quest for the great and holy city. 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

If the strained relationship between science and Romanticism had an anthem, it might be today’s poem. 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 poem demonstrates that, unlike Arnold’s sideburns, loving the Bard never goes out of style. Although remembered now for his elegantly argued critical essays, Matthew Arnold, born in Laleham, Middlesex, on December 24, 1822, began his career as a poet, winning early recognition as a student at the Rugby School where his father, Thomas Arnold, had earned national acclaim as a strict and innovative headmaster. Arnold also studied at Balliol College, Oxford University. In 1844, after completing his undergraduate degree at Oxford, he returned to Rugby as a teacher of classics.After marrying in 1851, Arnold began work as a government school inspector, a grueling position which nonetheless afforded him the opportunity to travel throughout England and the Continent. Throughout his thirty-five years in this position Arnold developed an interest in education, an interest which fed into both his critical works and his poetry. Empedocles on Etna (1852) and Poems (1853) established Arnold’s reputation as a poet and, in 1857, he was offered a position, which he accepted and held until 1867, as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Arnold became the first professor to lecture in English rather than Latin. During this time Arnold wrote the bulk of his most famous critical works, Essays in Criticism (1865) and Culture and Anarchy (1869), in which he sets forth ideas that greatly reflect the predominant values of the Victorian era.Meditative and rhetorical, Arnold’s poetry often wrestles with problems of psychological isolation. In “To Marguerite—Continued,” for example, Arnold revises John Donne’s assertion that “No man is an island,” suggesting that we “mortals” are indeed “in the sea of life enisled.” Other well-known poems, such as “Dover Beach,” link the problem of isolation with what Arnold saw as the dwindling faith of his time. Despite his own religious doubts, a source of great anxiety for him, in several essays Arnold sought to establish the essential truth of Christianity. His most influential essays, however, were those on literary topics. In “The Function of Criticism” (1865) and “The Study of Poetry” (1880) Arnold called for a new epic poetry: a poetry that would address the moral needs of his readers, “to animate and ennoble them.” Arnold’s arguments, for a renewed religious faith and an adoption of classical aesthetics and morals, are particularly representative of mainstream Victorian intellectual concerns. His approach—his gentlemanly and subtle style—to these issues, however, established criticism as an art form, and has influenced almost every major English critic since, including T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and Harold Bloom. Though perhaps less obvious, the tremendous influence of his poetry, which addresses the poet’s most innermost feelings with complete transparency, can easily be seen in writers as different from each other as W. B. Yeats, James Wright, Sylvia Plath, and Sharon Olds. Late in life, in 1883 and 1886, Arnold made two lecturing tours of the United States.Matthew Arnold died in Liverpool on April 15, 1888.-bio via Academy of American Poets 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

James Arlington Wright was born on December 13, 1927, in Martins Ferry, Ohio. His father worked for fifty years at a glass factory, and his mother left school at fourteen to work in a laundry; neither attended school beyond the eighth grade. While in high school in 1943, Wright suffered a nervous breakdown and missed a year of school. When he graduated in 1946, a year late, he joined the U.S. Army and was stationed in Japan during the American occupation. He then attended Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill, and studied under John Crowe Ransom. While there, he also befriended future fellow poet Robert Mezey. Wright graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1952. Wright traveled to Austria, where, on a Fulbright Fellowship, he studied the works of Theodor Storm and Georg Trakl at the University of Vienna. He returned to the U.S. and earned master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Washington, studying with Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz. He went on to teach at The University of Minnesota, Macalester College, and New York City’s Hunter College.The poverty and human suffering Wright witnessed as a child profoundly influenced his writing and he used his poetry as a mode to discuss his political and social concerns. He modeled his work after that of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, whose engagement with profound human issues and emotions he admired. The subjects of Wright’s earlier books, The Green Wall (Yale University Press, 1957), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and Saint Judas (Wesleyan University Press, 1959), include men and women who have lost love or have been marginalized from society and they invite the reader to step in and experience the pain of their isolation. Wright possessed the ability to reinvent his writing style at will, moving easily from stage to stage. His earlier work adheres to conventional systems of meter and stanza, while his later work exhibits more open, looser forms, as with The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press, 1963).Wright was elected a fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1971, and, the following year, his Collected Poems (Wesleyan University Press) received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.Wright died in New York City on March 25, 1980. 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 the delightfully clever Wendy Cope, epitomizes the rare and complicated light verse form: the double-dactyl.Wendy Cope was raised in Kent, England, where her parents often recited poetry to her. She earned a BA in history and trained as a teacher at Oxford University. Cope taught in primary schools for many years before publishing her first book of poetry, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986). The collection was an incredible success, selling tens of thousands of copies in the UK. It also announced Cope’s remarkable talents for parody, word play, dexterity with received forms, and the use of humor to address grave topics. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, critic and poet A.M. Juster declared, “one has to go back to Byron to find a poet as consistently witty, wide-ranging, and technically outstanding as Cope.”Cope’s poetry collections include Serious Concerns (1992); If I Don’t Know (2001), shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award; Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems 1979–2006 (2008); Family Values (2011); Christmas Poems (2017), a collection of new and previously published Christmas-themed work; and Anecdotal Evidence (2018). She is the author of the prose collection Life, Love and the Archers (2015) and two books for children, Twiddling Your Thumbs (1988) and The River Girl (1991), and the editor of numerous anthologies, including, The Faber Book of Bedtime Stories (1999).Cope has received a Cholmondeley Award and a Michael Braude Award for Light Verse from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, she was awarded an Order of the British Empire. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Winchester, England.-bio via Poetry Foundation 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 is for all those already wondering what they will do when the baseball season ends next month. 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

Richard Wilbur was born in New York City on March 1, 1921 and studied at Amherst College before serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. He later attended Harvard University.Wilbur’s first book of poems, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (Reynal & Hitchcock) was published in 1947. Since then, he has published several books of poems, including Anterooms: New Poems and Translations (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010); Collected Poems, 1943–2004 (Harvest Books, 2004); Mayflies: New Poems and Translations (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000); New and Collected Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Mind-Reader: New Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translations (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969); Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961); Things of This World (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Ceremony and Other Poems (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950).Wilbur also published numerous translations of French plays—specifically those of the seventeenth century French dramatists Molière and Jean Racine—as well as poetry by Paul Valéry, François Villon, Charles Baudelaire, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, and others. Wilbur is also the author of several books for children and a few collections of prose pieces, and has edited such books as Poems of Shakespeare (Penguin Books, 1966) and The Complete Poems of Poe (Dell Publishing Company, 1959).About Wilbur’s poems, one reviewer for the Washington Post said, “Throughout his career Wilbur has shown, within the compass of his classicism, enviable variety. His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection.”Among Wilbur’s honors are the Wallace Stevens Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Frost Medal, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Bollingen Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Ford Foundation Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, the National Arts Club medal of honor for literature, two PEN translation awards, the Prix de Rome Fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Award. He was elected a chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques and is a former poet laureate of the United States.Wilbur served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1961 to 1995. He died on October 15, 2017 in Belmont, Massachusetts.-bio via Academy of American Poets 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

Cullen’s exact birthplace is unknown, but in 1918, at the age of 15, Countee LeRoy was adopted by Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the minster to the largest church congregation in Harlem.Cullen kept his finger on the pulse of Harlem during the 1920s while he attended New York University and then a graduate program at Harvard. His poetry became popular during his student years, especially his prize-winning poem “The Ballad of a Brown Girl.” In 1925, he published his first volume of poetry entitled Color. Within the next few years, Cullen became well-known, publishing several books and winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928 (to write poetry in France).At first, Cullen was critical of Langston Hughes’ poetry, writing that, in using jazz rhythms in his poetry, Hughes was erecting barriers between race instead of removing them. In his own poetry, Cullen sought to erase these boundaries and took traditionalist poets, such as Keats and A.E. Housman, as models for his own poetry. However, despite his criticisms of other black poets, the majority of Cullen’s own verses confront racial issues.By the 1930s, Cullen’s influence had waned, though he continued to publish prolifically, including novels, a collection of poems for children, the autobiography of his cat, and an adaption of his novel God Sends Sunday into a Broadway musical.-bio via Song of America 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

In today’s poem, the inimitably magnanimous Dr. Johnson eulogizes the man of “The single talent well employed.” Happy birthday to the good doctor, and happy reading to the rest. 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 is a passage of blank verse from Act 5, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s King Lear. In the action of the play the scene is a prelude to tragedy, but as a picture of love between father and daughter it is almost perfect. 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

Some Mondays call for a poem that is uncomplicated and perfectly delightful–and Milne never disappoints. 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

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English journalist, novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.Kipling's works of fiction include the Jungle Book duology (The Jungle Book, 1894; The Second Jungle Book, 1895), Kim (1901), the Just So Stories (1902) and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His poems include "Mandalay" (1890), "Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), and "If—" (1910). He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story. His children's books are classics; one critic noted "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".Kipling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the United Kingdom's most popular writers. Henry James said "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known." In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and at 41, its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both. Following his death in 1936, his ashes were interred at Poets' Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey.-bio via Wikipedia 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

There comes a point in every life when “birthday” goes from meaning "pizza party” to meaning “memento mori.” Today’s poem goes out to everyone in the latter group. 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 the age-old question of loss and grief is answered…by the man who raised it in the first place. 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

Nelson is likely best known for her literary output as a poet. She regularly published in Opportunity and Crisis magazines between 1917 and 1928. Her poems also appeared in James Weldon Johnson’s seminal anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931). Nelson began to keep a personal diary in 1921. Her entries from 1926 to 1931 were later edited by scholar Gloria T. Hull for a volume entitled Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (W. W. Norton, 1984).Toward the end of her public career, Nelson focused on journalism and public speaking. She gave numerous speeches as the executive secretary of the American Friends Inter-Racial Peace Committee from 1928 to 1931. From 1926 to 1930, Nelson wrote newspaper columns and became an activist for women’s suffrage and civil rights. In 1922, she advocated for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, and helped establish the Industrial School for Colored Girls in Delaware. One of her speeches was published and included in Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence (The Bookery Publishing Company, 1914), and examples of her dialect poetry, dramatic prose, and oratory were collected The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer (J. L. Nichols & Co., 1920). Both are anthologies that Nelson edited. -bio via Academy of American Poets 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 author of several collections of poetry–most recently Life on Earth–Dorianne Laux was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award for her book Facts About the Moon. She has also authored several works of non-fiction including The Poet’s Companion and Finger Exercises For Poets. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. 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–#6 in Donne’s La Corona sonnet cycle–is an ideal consummation for many of the themes introduced in this week’s selections. Now go read the rest of his holy sonnets! 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, Donne’s best-known poem, but maybe not his last word on death. 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 poem dramatizes Donne’s inner turmoil and conflicting desires, but is not without hope. 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 Holy Sonnet is the fourth in Donne’s underrated (if a poet as great as Donne can have underrated work) sonnet cycle, La Corona. The title translates to “crown” and the cycle’s opening line introduces the poems as a woven “crown of prayer and praise” offered to God, narrating and commenting upon significant events in the life of Jesus. Sonnet 4, “Temple,” centers on the sole recorded episode from Jesus’ youth. 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 marks the beginning of a week of Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” (interpreted generously to also include selections from his sonnet cycle, “La Corona”). In this first sonnet, he establishes the themes––human weakness, self-doubt, terrestrial anguish, and divine transcendence and consolation––that will return throughout the series. 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, one of our favorite living poets asks questions about one of our favorite poems. 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

In today’s poem Thomas Merton, 20th-century author and mystic, comes to an understanding of his monastic vocation through a contemplation of John the Baptist’s prenatal gymnastics. 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

Ted Hughes, one of the giants of twentieth-century British poetry, was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire. After serving in the Royal Air Force, Hughes attended Cambridge, where he studied archeology and anthropology and took a special interest in myths and legends. In 1956, he met and married the American poet Sylvia Plath, who encouraged him to submit his manuscript to a first-book contest run by the Poetry Center. Awarded first prize by judges Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender, The Hawk in the Rain (Faber & Faber, 1957) secured Hughes’s reputation as a poet of international stature. According to poet and critic Robert B. Shaw, Hughes’s poetry signaled a dramatic departure from the prevailing modes of the period. The stereotypical poem of the time was determined not to risk too much: politely domestic in its subject matter, understated and mildly ironic in style. By contrast, Hughes marshaled a language of nearly Shakespearean resonance to explore themes which were mythic and elemental.Hughes remained a controversial figure after Plath’s suicide left him as her literary executor and he refused (citing family privacy) to publish many of her papers. Nevertheless, his long career included unprecedented best-selling volumes such as Lupercal (Faber & Faber, 1960), Crow (Faber & Faber, 1970), Selected Poems 1957–1981 (Faber & Faber, 1982), and Birthday Letters (Faber & Faber, 1998), as well as many beloved children’s books, including The Iron Man (Faber & Faber, 1968), which was adapted as The Iron Giant (1999). With Seamus Heaney, he edited the popular anthologies The Rattle Bag (Faber & Faber, 1982) and The School Bag (Faber & Faber, 1997). Hughes was named executor of Plath’s literary estate and he edited several volumes of her work. Hughes also translated works from classical authors, including Ovid and Aeschylus. Hughes was appointed Britain’s Poet Laureate in 1984, a post he held until his death in 1998. Among his many awards, he was appointed to the Order of Merit, one of Britain’s highest honors.Hughes married Carol Orchard in 1970, and the couple lived on a small farm in Devon until his death. His forays into translations, essays, and criticism were noted for their intelligence and range. Hughes continued writing and publishing poems until his death from cancer on October 28, 1998. A memorial to Hughes in the famed Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey was unveiled in 2011.-bio via Poetry Foundation 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

Mark Strand was born on Canada’s Prince Edward Island on April 11, 1934. He received a BA from Antioch College in Ohio in 1957 and attended Yale University, where he was awarded the Cook Prize and the Bergin Prize. After receiving his BFA degree in 1959, Strand spent a year studying at the University of Florence on a Fulbright fellowship. In 1962 he received his MA from the University of Iowa.Strand was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Almost Invisible (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Man and Camel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Blizzard of One (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Dark Harbor (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); The Continuous Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Selected Poems (Atheneum, 1980); The Story of Our Lives (Atheneum, 1973); and Reasons for Moving (Atheneum, 1968).Strand also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century (W. W. Norton, 2005); The Golden Ecco Anthology (Ecco, 1994); The Best American Poetry 1991; and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, co-edited with Charles Simic (HarperCollins, 1976).Strand’s honors included the Bollingen Prize, a Rockefeller Foundation award, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 2004 Wallace Stevens Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1979, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from the Academy of American Poets, as well as fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.Strand served as poet laureate of the United States from 1990 to 1991 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1995 to 2000. He taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City.Mark Strand died at eighty years old on November 29, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York.-bio via Academy of American Poets 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 is a meta-reflection on the constraints of poetic form that has something to say about all of life’s formal constraints. 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 poem–perfect for a Friday–gives us a less familiar (PG-13) Emily Dickinson, dreaming of letting her hair down. 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 poem is a classic staple with Literature teachers for its expressive metaphors; it is a classic staple with me because it’s such a cracking-good poem. 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 poem captures one of the universal challenges of education: recognizing the distinctions and distances between all human souls, and then bridging them without erasing them. 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

As the school year begins, today’s poem goes out to all of those everyday saints performing the unseen and unsung acts of love that make life possible for rest of us!Born Asa Bundy Sheffey on August 4, 1913, Robert Hayden was raised in the Detroit neighborhood Paradise Valley. He had an emotionally tumultuous childhood and lived, at times, with his parents and with a foster family. In 1932, he graduated from high school and, with the help of a scholarship, attended Detroit City College (later, Wayne State University). In 1944, Hayden received his graduate degree from the University of Michigan.Hayden published his first book of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust (Falcon Press), in 1940, at the age of twenty-seven. He enrolled in a graduate English literature program at the University of Michigan, where he studied with W. H. Auden. Auden became an influential and critical guide in the development of Hayden’s writing. Hayden admired the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wiley, Carl Sandburg, and Hart Crane, as well as the poets of the Harlem Renaissance—Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer. He had an interest in African American history and explored his concerns about race in his writing. Hayden ultimately authored nine collections of poetry during his lifetime, as well as a collection of essays, and some children’s literature. Hayden’s poetry gained international recognition in the 1960s, and he was awarded the grand prize for poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966 for his book Ballad of Remembrance (Paul Breman, 1962).Explaining the trajectory of Hayden’s career, the poet William Meredith wrote:Hayden declared himself, at considerable cost in popularity, an American poet rather than a Black poet, when for a time there was posited an unreconcilable difference between the two roles. There is scarcely a line of his which is not identifiable as an experience of Black America, but he would not relinquish the title of American writer for any narrower identity.After receiving his graduate degree from the University of Michigan, Hayden remained there for two years as a teaching fellow. He was the first Black member of the English department. He then joined the faculty at Fisk University in Nashville, where he would remain for more than twenty years. In 1975, Hayden received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship and, in 1976, he became the first Black American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (later, U.S. poet laureate).Hayden died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on February 25, 1980.-bio via Academy of American Poets 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 a picture is worth 1,000 words, sometimes a portrait of your last wife who died under suspicious circumstances is as good as a confession. 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

Hopefully five days of limericks has made this week a little lighter and a little brighter. See you next week for more of our regularly programming. Till then, 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 limericks are all about unexpected consequences. Happy reading.Children’s poet and educator Constance Levy earned degrees at Washington University and currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri. Known for its careful attention to external and internal rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, and assonance, Levy’s work frequently takes encounters with the natural world as its subject. By drawing on her own childhood encounters, Levy re-experiences the world through verse in the fresh and exuberant ways that children perceive natural objects and phenomena, often for the first time. Reviewers have consistently praised Levy’s poems for their accessible yet creative language. Her books include The Story of Red Rubber Ball (2004), Splash!: Poems of Our Watery World (2002), A Crack in the Clouds and Other Poems (1998), A Tree Place and Other Poems (1994), and I’m Going to Pet a Worm Today and Other Poems (1991). School Library Journal’s Kathleen Whalin summed up the appeal of Levy’s verse best in her review of When Whales Exhale and Other Poems: “To read Levy is to see the wonder of the everyday world.”-bio via Poetry Foundation 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

Things are getting hairy. 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

While limericks can be plenty nonsensical, today’s are downright sensible–especially that of Leigh Mercer, famous for his mathematical wordplay and best known for creating the enterprising palindrome, “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!". 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

It’s another weekly gimmerick here on the Daily Poem. Edward Lear (12 May 1812 – 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised.His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations of birds and animals, making coloured drawings during his journeys (which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books) and as a minor illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems.As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry.-bio via Wikipedia 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

Nâzim Hikmet was born on January 15, 1902, in Salonika, Ottoman Empire (now Thessaloníki, Greece), where his father served in the Foreign Service. He was exposed to poetry at an early age through his artist mother and poet grandfather, and had his first poems published when he was seventeen.Raised in Istanbul, Hikmet left Allied-occupied Turkey after the First World War and ended up in Moscow, where he attended university and met writers and artists from all over the world. After the Turkish Independence in 1924, he returned to Turkey but was soon arrested for working on a leftist magazine. He managed to escape to Russia, where he continued to write plays and poems.In 1928, a general amnesty allowed Hikmet to return to Turkey, and during the next ten years he published nine books of poetry—five collections and four long poems—while working as a proofreader, journalist, scriptwriter, and translator. He left Turkey for the last time in 1951, after serving a lengthy jail sentence for his radical acts, and lived in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where he continued to work for the ideals of world Communism. After receiving early recognition for his patriotic poems in syllabic meter, Hikmet came under the influence of the Russian Futurists in Moscow, and abandoned traditional forms while attempting to “depoetize” poetry.Many of Hikmet’s works have been translated into English, including Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse (Persea Books, 2009); Things I Didn’t Know I Loved (Persea Books, 1975); The Day Before Tomorrow (Carcanet Press, 1972); The Moscow Symphony (Rapp & Whiting, 1970); and Selected Poems (Cape Editions, 1967). In 1936, he published Seyh Bedreddin destani [The Epic of Shaykh Bedreddin] and Memleketimden insan manzaralari [Portraits of People from My Land].Hikmet died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1963. The first modern Turkish poet, he is recognized around the world as one of the great international poets of the twentieth century.-bio via Academy of American Poets 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

Maybe you remember the experiences recounted in today’s poem—maybe you don’t. 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

T. S. Eliot is remembered as a great poet, but he is surpassingly underrated as a namer of cats. 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

Warren (1905-1989) was born in Kentucky and educated at Vanderbilt University and the University of California, Berkeley. Though perhaps best known for his 1946 novel All the King’s Men, he was the author of over a dozen books of poetry in addition to his prose work. He is the only writer to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction (in 1947) and poetry (in 1958 and 1979). Warren’s other honors include a Rhodes Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the National Medal of Arts. He taught at Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis and co-authored several literature textbooks.-bio via Library of Congress 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

Bruce Lansky is an internationally known poet and anthologist. He has a passion for getting children excited about reading and writing poetry. Lansky’s poetry books—including A Bad Case of the Giggles (2013), Peter, Peter, Pizza-Eater (2006), Mary Had a Little Jam (2004), If Kids Ruled the School (2004), and Rolling in the Aisles (2004)—are among America’s best-selling children’s poetry books. He is also the editor of the middle-grade fiction series Girls to the Rescue and Newfangled Fairy Tales. Lansky has performed in more than 300 schools from coast to coast. He enjoys returning to his peaceful home near one of Minnesota’s most beautiful lakes, just outside Minneapolis.-bio via Poetry Foundation 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 from Ogden Nash, “The Ant” and “The Ostrich,” are the perfect marriage of wit and attention. 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

Oliver Herford (2 December 1860 – 5 July 1935), regarded as “the American Oscar Wilde,” was an Anglo-American writer, artist, and illustrator known for his pithy bon mots and skewed sense of humor. His obituary in The New York Times nicely sums up his unique brilliance:"His wit…was too original at first to go down with the very delectable highly respectable magazine editors of the Nineties. It was odd, unexpected, his own brand. It takes genius to write the best nonsense, which is often far more sensible than sense. Herford's, the result of care and polish, looked unforced.…Intelligent, thoughtful, well-bred, what with his animals and his children and his artistic simplicities, he was remote from the style of the best moderns. No violence, no obscenity, not even obscurity or that long-windedness which is the signet of the illustrious writer of today. An old-fashioned gentleman, a painstaking artist, whose work had edge, grace and distinction." 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 begins with humble beasts but wings its way to the loftiest mysteries of existence. 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