The Daily Poem

Today’s poem grew out of an elaborate game of make-believe between the Brontë siblings, and gives some idea of the mature verse that might have been if Anne had not died young. Happy(?) reading. Anne Brontë (17 January 1820 – 28 May 1849) was an English novelist and poet, the youngest member of the Brontë literary family. Anne Brontë was the daughter of Maria (néeBranwell) and Patrick Brontë, a po...

Today’s poem is the final stanza of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” in which the hero of the Trojan war persuades his aging compatriots to wring out the last of their energies in a quest for the ends of the earth–“to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” 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.su...

Poet’s don’t typically compete for “coolest book cover,” and it’s probably because Zbigniew Herbert won years ago. Today’s poem is his tender look at poverty, pleasure, and irretrievable loss. Zbigniew Herbert was born on October 29, 1924, in Poland in the city of Lvov, which is now a part of the Ukraine. His grandfather was an Englishman who settled in Lvov to teach English. His father, a former...

Today’s poem glides, settles, dances, waves, and soars its way through the unassuming comforts of the familiar. 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

Phyllis McGinley (March 21, 1905 – February 22, 1978) was an American author of children's books and poetry. Her poetry was in the style of light verse, specializing in humor, satiric tone and the positive aspects of suburban life. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1961. McGinley enjoyed a wide readership in her lifetime, publishing her work in newspapers and women's magazines such as the Ladies Home Jo...

As William Shakespeare was putting the final touchers on Hamlet , George Chapman was beginning (arguably) an even more momentous undertaking: introducing the English-speaking world to Homer’s epics. In a turn of historical irony, the fame of Chapman’s translation continues almost solely in and through today’s poem–but there are worse ways to be remembered. Happy reading. This is a public episode....

Today’s poem was too topical to pass up. Like so many of Oliver’s poems, it is an invitation to attend closely to life’s unexpected gifts. 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, whose full title is “Stilton and Milton; Or Literature in the 17th and 20th Centuries,” has something for book lovers and cheese lovers alike to dig in to. Chesterton once wrote that “poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese,” and he then set about rectifying that state of affairs through poems like these. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to...

Today’s poem, though written for the far more infrequent crowning of monarchs, contains plenty of sentiments fitting for a quadrennial presidential inauguration. Happy reading. On a pillar on the west wall of Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey is a white marble bust to poet and clergyman John Keble. The bust is signed and dated by Thomas Woolner, 1872 and is just inscribed 'JOHN KEBLE'. The memori...

Though not yet the Dantesque hells that they are today, airports in 1954 were already places of union, separation, and general existential anxiety. This meditation comes from a serious and sphinx-like Winters at the height of his poetic development–though not yet at his own “terminal,” here he is a man who already has plenty to look back on. Happy reading. (Arthur) Yvor Winters was born in Chicago...

If hot takes about synonyms are your cup of tea, favorite, darling, jam, or weapon of choice, then today’s poem is for you. 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

We that acquaint ourselves with every zone,And pass both tropics and behold the poles,When we come home, are to ourselves unknown,And unacquainted still with our own souls. Today’s poem is Davies’ lengthy meditation on what man can know and what he could stand to learn. Happy reading. Poet and lawyer Sir John Davies was born in Wiltshire and educated at Winchester College and Queen’s College, Oxfo...

Today’s poems are selected from Ted Kooser’s The Blizzard Voices , a collection of informal verse commemorating the apocalyptic Great Plains blizzard of 1888. He mined histories and first-hand accounts to give “voice” to the men and women who lived through the unprecedented storm. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus e...

Today’s poem is a roller-coaster of machismo and vulnerability in that most singular of places–the poetry section of a small bookstore. Happy reading. Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) was a popular and prolific British novelist, poet, satirist, and critic. Born in suburban South London, the only child of a clerk in the office of the mustard-maker Colman’s, he won an English scholarship to St John’s Colle...

Today’s poem offers an incisive analogy for analogies. Happy reading. A.E. (Alicia) Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (20...

Today’s poem draws together marriage and the blessing of water. 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 you can see “a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,” what can you see in the trashcan at the curb? Apparently quite a bit, if you look closely. Today’s poem, a paean to the unsung heroes of the holidays, can help with that. Also in today’s episode: a look at what’s new for The Daily Poem in 2025. Happy reading! Philip Appleman (1926-2020) served in the U.S. Army Air Corps dur...

Does today’s poem contain the secret to minimizing regret in 2025? Kinda, sorta. Happy reading. In his youth, Robert Service worked in a shipping office and a bank, and briefly studied literature at the University of Glasgow. Inspired by Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, Service sailed to western Canada in 1894 to become a cowboy in the Yukon Wilderness. He worked on a ranch and as a ban...

Happy New Year (and Happy Reading) from The Daily Poem! Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to academic Calvinist parents, poet, author, and Native American rights activist Helen Hunt Jackson (born Helen Maria Fiske) was orphaned as a child and raised by her aunt. Jackson was sent to private schools and formed a lasting childhood friendship with Emily Dickinson. At the age of 21, Jackson married Lieut...

…I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. Today’s poem seemed an appropriate choice as we endure the death of one year and the pregnant anticipation of another. 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.s...

The repetition of the word “unsatisfied” forms a set of bookends in today’s poem. Inside those bookends: earth, sky, and the riches of this world. Beyond them: “The uncontrollable mystery.” 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

“the Christmas Tree is a tree of fable,/A phoenix in evergreen” Cecil Day Lewis tackles the leave-taking of Christmas and the emotional upheaval in can work in the hearts of kids from 1 to 92. Happy reading (and don’t take down that tree yet!) Lewis, (born April 27, 1904, Ballintubbert, County Leix, Ire.—died May 22, 1972, Hadley Wood, Hertfordshire, Eng.) was one of the leading British poets of t...

“To those who have seen/The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,/The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.” 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

Christ is born! Merry Christmas and happy reading! Today’s poem is a selection from Auden’s superb long poem, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio . 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

J. R. R. Tolkien loved Christmas–we can find ample proof of this in his Letters From Father Christmas , but also in his choosing December 25 as the day the fellowship of the Ring should set out from Rivendell and begin the destruction of evil in Middle Earth. Today’s poem, once lost to history but rediscovered and included in his Collected Poems , is his most explicit tribute to the Nativity. Happ...