The Daily Poem

Today’s poem is a series of increasingly vital pleas. Happy reading. For more of Belloc’s advice to the young, find yourself a copy of Cautionary Tales for Children ! 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 we’re feeling out a Saturday bonus episode featuring a reading of “Morituri Salutamus” in its entirety. 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 episode features selections from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s fifty-year retrospective on his own graduation, the lengthy speech-in-verse, “Morituri Salutamus: Poem for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of 1825 in Bowdoin College.” Come back tomorrow to hear the poem in full. Happy reading! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to...

Today’s poem from Christina Rossetti is not about high school or college, but it might still be about graduation. 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

Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis, known, especially in English, as Constantine P. Cavafy and often published as C. P. Cavafy, was a Greek poet, journalist, and civil servant from Alexandria. A major figure of modern Greek literature, he is sometimes considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century. - bio via Wikipedia This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other su...

Matthew Zapruder is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently I Love Hearing Your Dreams , forthcoming from Scribner in September 2024 , as well as two books of prose: Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and  Story of a Poem  (Unnamed, 2023). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-7 he held the annually rotating position of Edit...

About the creative process itself, John Ciardi argued in the Writer that “it isn’t easy to make a poem,” adding, “It is better than easy: it is joyously, consumingly difficult. As it is difficult, too, though without joy, to face one’s failures.” Noting that the creation of successful verse requires definite skill, he wrote: “I insist that a poet needs at least as much training as does a concert p...

Today’s poems are all about the ineffable experience of spring. Happy reading! The 17th-century Japanese haiku master Bashō was born Matsuo Kinsaku near Kyoto, Japan, to a minor samurai and his wife. Soon after the poet’s birth, Japan closed its borders, beginning a seclusion that allowed its native culture to flourish. It is believed that Bashō’s siblings became farmers, while Bashō, at Ueno Cast...

Today’s poem–an unambiguous paean to spring–suggests Thomas Nashe and T. S. Eliot had very different feelings about the month of April. Happy reading! Thomas Nashe (1567 - c. 1601) –English pamphleteer, poet, dramatist, and novelist– was the first of the English prose eccentrics. Nashe wrote in a vigorous combination of colloquial diction and idiosyncratic coined compounds that was ideal for contr...

Today’s poem is a more complicated take on spring. 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

E.E. Cummings, in full Edward Estlin Cummings, (born October 14, 1894, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.—died September 3, 1962, North Conway, New Hampshire), American poet and painter who first attracted attention, in an age of literary experimentation, for his unconventional punctuation and phrasing. Cummings’s name is often styled “e.e. cummings” in the mistaken belief that the poet legally change...

What started as an early spring is now not long for this world. In an attempt to stave off an early summer , we have a week of poems dedicated to the fairest of the seasons. Happy reading. Phillis Levin (born 1954) is the author of four poetry collections, including May Day (Penguin, 2008). She also served as editor for The Penguin Book of the Sonnet (2001) and teaches at Hofstra University. - bio...

Today’s poem is a Robert Frost classic of which everyone always remembers the wrong part. 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

Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic school, and Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death. Like the other Lake Poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey began as a radical but became steadily more conservative as he gained respect for Britain and its institutions. Other romantics such as Byron accused him of siding with the establishment for money and status. He i...

Today’s poem goes out to all the ‘pilgrim souls.’ 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, John Keats isn’t worried about authenticity–and that’s just fine. 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 reminds us how much is sometimes riding on the proper grammatical distinctions. Born in Cumberland, British Romantic poet and prose writer Dorothy Wordsworth was the third of five children. Her mother died when Wordsworth was six, and she moved to Halifax to live with her aunt. In 1781 she enrolled in Hipperholme Boarding School. When her father died in 1783, the family’s financial si...

Today’s poem is almost too bright for our infirm delight. 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 features a failed resurrection and a response that spirals through all the customary stages of grief. Hilda Doolittle was born on September 10, 1886, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She attended Bryn Mawr College, where she was a classmate of Marianne Moore. Doolittle later enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where she befriended Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. H.D. publis...

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. Lewis wrote more...

Find somebody to watch the kids while you giggle through today’s poem. Happy reading. Respected editor, publisher, writer and poet, Paul Ruffin often relied upon his experiences growing up in the South as a foundation for his stories.  He was born in Millport, Alabama, and grew up outside Columbus, Mississippi. After serving in the U.S. Army, Ruffin earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees...

Today’s poem ponders what love makes of language. 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 (2006)...

Today’s poem is inspired by one of our favorites here at the Daily Poem. Librettist, essayist, translator, and author of ten poetry collections, Scott Cairns is Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of Missouri. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic , and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best...

Ted Kooser, who worked in insurance for thirty-five years before becoming U.S. Poet Laureate, turns 85 today. Many happy returns of the day to him, and happy reading to the rest of you! 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

Have you measured out your life in coffee spoons? Feeling like a pair of ragged claws today? Afraid to eat messy food while other people are watching? Or are you just channeling a little too much Polonius? If so, today’s poem–the classic modernist anthem of insecurity and isolation (and mermaids)–will feel very familiar. Happy reading! (And for an even better reading of this poem, you should disco...