The Daily Poem

Today’s poem marks a very special day. Happy reading.

Today’s poem, introducing the counterpart to “Songs of Innocence,” is a dialogue that immediately deepens the mood of the more “mature” lyrics that will follow. Happy reading.

Sweet is the home you leave. Happy reading.

Today’s poem is a somber, paternal retrospective from the Ancient Mariner poet. Happy reading.

Today’s poem kicks off a short trek through English poetry. Happy reading.

My friend Simon Curtis, who has died aged 70, was one of the small band of people who work tirelessly, for no pay and few thanks, to promote poetry. An excellent poet himself, he edited two magazines and helped many struggling writers into print.

His heroes were Wordsworth, Hardy and Causley. His own poetry, which rhymed and was perfectly accessible, was distinguished by, in his words, its "shrewd, ironic and Horatian tone". It ranged from accomplished light verse, which was often very funny, to deeply affecting poems about family bereavement. He appeared in the Faber Poetry Introduction 6 (1985).

Today’s poem grows on you. Happy reading.

David Wojahn grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. He studied at the University of Minnesota and the University of Arizona. Ever since his first collection, Icehouse Lights, was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1981, Wojahn has been one of American poetry’s most thoughtful examiners of culture and memory. His work often investigates how history plays out in the lives of individuals, and poet Tom Sleigh says that his poems “meld the political and personal in a way that is unparalleled by any living American poet.”

Wojahn’s book World Tree (2011) received the Lenore M...

A little light verse for anyone who wants to rise (far) above the noise for a moment. Happy reading.

Bert Leston Taylor (November 13, 1866 – March 19, 1921) was an American columnist, humorist, poet, and author.

Bert Leston Taylor became a journalist at seventeen, a librettist at twenty-one, and a successfully published author at thirty-five. At the height of his literary career, he was a central literary figure of the early 20th century Chicago renaissance as well as one of the most celebrated columnists in the United States.

-bio via Wikipedia

Death has been personified and analogized in myriad ways, but none perhaps so withering as today’s imagining of death as a fascist bureaucrat. Happy reading.

Jeanne Murray Walker was born in a village of 900 people in northern Minnesota. She was first published by The Atlantic Monthly at age 19. Today she’s the prize-winning author of nine books of poetry. Jeanne serves as a Mentor in the Seattle Pacific University low residency MFA Program and travels widely to give readings and workshops.

-bio via Paraclete Press

Today’s poem is a comical maxim that typifies the heavy lifting light verse is capable of. Happy reading.

Poet Timothy Murphy was born in Hibbing, Minnesota, and graduated from Yale University, where he participated in the Scholar of the House program. He was a partner in a large-scale hog farm and a businessperson. His books include the poetry collections The Deed of Gift (1998), Very Far North (2002), Mortal Stakes • Faint Thunder (2011), Hunter's Log (2011), and Devotions (2017) as well as a memoir, Set the Ploughshare Deep: A Prairie Memoir (2000). He has also translated Beowulf. Though hunting and farming are essential subjects for his writing, myths and legends influence his work as well. He passed away in June 2018.

-bio vi...

Today’s poem has become one of the most famous 20th-century war poems–in part because of its ability to grant fallen soldiers a voice that is earnestly patriotic without becoming jingoistic. Perhaps the balance is a reflection of the steadiness of the Canadian veteran who penned it. Happy reading.

Today’s poem is a Heaney favorite, and goes out to all of the couples tying the knot this summer. Happy reading!

The uniting, in today’s poem, of Spring and sadness is not immediately intuitive. However, it makes more natural sense amidst the many partings and reminiscences of graduation season. Happy reading.

Today’s poem shows us a teacher wrestling with the notion of “graduation.” Happy reading.

Bill Knott was born on February 17, 1940, in Carson City, Michigan. When he was seven years old, his mother died in childbirth, and his father passed away three years later. He grew up in an orphanage in Mooseheart, Illinois, and on an uncle’s farm. In the late 1950s, he joined the U.S. Army and, after serving his full enlistment, was honorably discharged in 1960.

In the early 1960s, Knott moved to Chicago, where he worked as a hospital orderly. There, he becam...

Today’s poem explains why some Australians wear beards.

Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson, CBE (17 February 1864 – 5 February 1941) was an Australian bush poet, journalist and author, widely considered one of the greatest writers of Australia's colonial period.

Born in rural New South Wales, Paterson worked as a lawyer before transitioning into literature, where he quickly gained recognition for capturing the life of the Australian bush. A representative of the Bulletin School of Australian literature, Paterson wrote many of his best known poems for the nationalist journal The Bulletin, including "Clancy of the Overflow" (1889) and "The Man from Snow...

Fernando Valverde (Granada, 1980) has been voted the most relevant Spanish-language poet born since 1970 by nearly two hundred critics and researchers from more than one hundred international universities (Harvard, Oxford, Columbia, Princeton, Bologna, Salamanca, UNAM and the Sorbonne).

His books have been published in different countries in Europe and America and translated into several languages. He has received some of the most prestigious awards for poetry in Spanish, including the Federico García Lorca, the Emilio Alarcos del Principado de Asturias and the Antonio Machado. His last book, The Insistence of Harm, received the Book of the Year a...

Today’s poem goes out to all the mothers–we wouldn’t be here without you! Happy reading.

Marya Zaturensky, Russian-born American poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, was born on September 12, 1902, in Kiev, Russia (now Ukraine). She emigrated to the United States with her family in 1909 and was educated in New York public schools; attended Valparaiso University, 1922–23; graduated from University of Wisconsin, 1925. The same year she married Horace Gregory (a poet and critic), and had two children: Joanna and Patrick.

Zaturensky won the John Reed Memorial Award from Poetry magazine (1922), the Shelley Memorial Award (1935), the Guaranto...

Today’s poem is one of the few enduring works of a poet and playwright who burned brightly during his heyday and then blinked out almost entirely. Happy reading.

Leigh, son of James Mathews Leigh, was born in London on 29 March 1837. At an early age he engaged in literary pursuits. From time to time appeared collections of his lyrics, under the titles of Carols of Cockayne, 1869 (several editions); Gillott and Goosequill, 1871; A Town Garland: a Collection of Lyrics, 1878; and Strains from the Strand: Trifles in Verse, 1882. His verse was always fluent, but otherwise of very slender merit.

Today’s poem owes a strong debt to Cowper’s “The Poplar Field” but also features a few stylistic echoes of Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” all while achieving a (superior?) effect of its own. Happy reading.

“As for man, his days are like grass.” It isn’t much of a stretch, then, when Cowper sees his own mortality in a grove of felled poplars. Happy reading.

William Cowper (1731-1800) was a renowned 18th century poet, hymnographer, and translator of Homer. His most famous works include his 5000-line poem ‘The Task’ and some charming and light-hearted verses, not least ‘The Diverting History of John Gilpin’. Phrases he coined such as ‘Variety is the spice of life’ are still in popular use today. While living in Olney he collaborated on ‘The Olney Hymns’ with his friend John Newton. <...

“The work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull.” -Roger Scruton

Larry Richman (1934-2023) was born in Philadelphia and grew up on a small Bucks County chicken farm north of the city. He attended local schools and then Colorado College, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with a BA in English in 1957. From Duke University, he received an MA in 1959 and a PhD in 1970.

Larry went on to teach English at the Beaufort and Florence Centers of the University of South Carolina, Washington & Lee...

Though J. R. R. Tolkien translated portions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, he did not live to complete the project. Fortunately another Inkling, Nevill Coghill, succeeded where Tolkien could not, and produced the modernized verse-rendering that today’s selection comes from. Happy reading!

Today’s poem has a way of reaching out and grabbing you. Happy reading.

Today’s poem–in which men and women are the two halves of a bell’s tone–voices the rhythms and joys of life in an unconventional way that has to be heard and understood with the body before the mind. Happy reading.

Today’s poem is about (not) getting the last word. Happy reading.

Walter de la Mare, born on April 25, 1873 in London, is considered one of modern literature’s chief exemplars of the romantic imagination. His complete works form a sustained treatment of romantic themes: dreams, death, rare states of mind and emotion, fantasy worlds of childhood, and the pursuit of the transcendent.

As a youth he attended St. Paul’s Cathedral School, and his formal education did not extend beyond this point. Upon graduation he went to work for the Anglo-American (Standard) Oil Company, remaining with t...

Today’s poem places us on the frontier of new life. Happy reading.

Today, the obligatory Good Friday poem (because it is excellent).

In today’s poem, Sandburg’s ability to make the same two lines land so differently with so little happening in between is a remarkable feat. Happy reading!

Today’s poem is sometimes known as “Song of the Ent and the Entwife” because, though Tolkien tinkered with it for more than a decade, it did not take its final form until he decided to adapt it for inclusion in The Lord of the Rings. Happy reading!

Franz Wright was born in Vienna, Austria and grew up in the Northwest, the Midwest, and California. He earned a BA from Oberlin College in 1977. His collections of poetry include The Beforelife (2001); God’s Silence (2006); Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004; Wheeling Motel (2009); Kindertotenwald (2011); and F (2013). In his precisely crafted, lyrical poems, Wright addresses the subjects of isolation, illness, spirituality, and gratitude. Of his work, he has commented, “I think ideally, I would like, in a poem, to operate by way of suggestion.”Critic Helen Vendler wrote in the New York Review of Books, “Wright's s...

Browning’s 1845 poem captures the affections of every transplant and ex-pat, conjuring the momentary return to a faraway home. Happy reading.

Mondays go down easier with Mary Oliver. Happy reading.

Today’s selections are characteristic passages from (maybe) the greatest and (certainly) strangest poem in Lyrical Ballads–Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Happy reading.

(Nota bene: If you are ready for your own copy of Lyrical Ballads, the Oxford World Classics edition is a great way to see the developments across early editions.)

While you can count on one hand the poems Coleridge contributed to Lyrical Ballads, they are some of the most memorable in the collection. Today’s poem uses an abstract description to conjure a very concrete social evil–the state of British prisons at the end of the long 18th century. Happy reading.

We begin a week of selections from Lyrical Ballads with today’s nostalgic and pastoral poem, “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798.” Happy reading!

Jonathan Kerr of the Wordsworth Trust writes about the revolutionary context of the Lyrical Ballads and the revolutionary nature of the project itself:

“Wordsworth and Coleridge’s first major literary undertaking and a pioneering work of English Romanticism – came into being at a tumultuous moment in England’s history…Not since the English Revolution had the country faced such alarming up...

What do Hilaire Belloc and a scorpion have in common? Happy reading.

Oliver Goldsmith (born Nov. 10, 1730, Kilkenny West, County Westmeath, Ire.—died April 4, 1774, London) was an Anglo-Irish essayist, poet, novelist, dramatist, and eccentric, made famous by such works as the series of essays The Citizen of the World, or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher (1762), the poem The Deserted Village (1770), the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and the play She Stoops to Conquer (1773).

Goldsmith was the son of an Anglo-Irish clergyman, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, curate in charge of Kilkenny West, County Westmeath. At about the time of his birth, the family moved into a substantial house at nearby Lissoy, wh...