The Daily Poem

Some poets wind up writing prayers by accident; others do it on purpose. Today’s poems from Robert Herrick –“Grace For a Child” and “His Prayer for Absolution”–are of the latter variety. 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–”The Hill Place” and “Day’s Diamond”–come from Robert P. Tristram Coffin. Coffin (1892-1955) grew up in Brunswick, Maine on a “saltwater farm.” He attended Bowdoin, Princeton, and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar before, as well as after, serving two years in World War I. He taught at Wells College in Aurora, New York from 1921-1934 and eventually returned to Bowdoin...

Today’s poem marks the ides (or idus ) or March, a day classically associated with the settling of debts (and maybe old scores, too). One of the foremost editors, literary critics, and anthologists of contemporary American literature, David Lehman is also one of its most accomplished poets. Born in New York City in 1948, Lehman earned a PhD from Columbia University and attended the University of...

Today’s poem is the work of an eighth-century poet whose reputation didn’t peak until the twentieth century. Li Po’s “The Solitude of Night” (translated here by Shigeyoshi Obata) resembles Japanese haiku in its atmospheric brevity and is heavy with the kind of common-to-man melancholy the modernists would feel so deeply more than a millennium later. A Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty, Li Po (also...

"A master of forms, Merrill’s later poetry rarely feels formal. In the Atlantic Monthly, poet X.J. Kennedy observed that “Merrill never sprawls, never flails about, never strikes postures. Intuitively he knows that, as Yeats once pointed out, in poetry, ‘all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt.’” - via Poetry Foundation This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss th...

Today’s poem is a master-class in snappy putdowns and the value of a fiercely-loyal and equally witty friend. Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (1870 – 1953) was a Franco-English writer and historian of the early 20th century. Belloc was also an orator, poet, sailor, satirist, writer of letters, soldier, and political activist. His Catholic faith had a strong effect on his works. Belloc became a n...

Today’s poem is a grand smorgasbord of poetical allusions from the unofficial patron of The Daily 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

Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her BA in English and world religions from Trinity University. Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently Everything Comes Next: Collec...

Today’s poem (from an oft-maligned poet) makes frequent appearances in poetry anthologies for children, but hides a satisfying subtlety. Colley Cibber (6 November 1671 – 11 December 1757) was an English actor-manager, playwright and Poet Laureate. His colourful memoir An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740) describes his life in a personal, anecdotal and even rambling style. He wrote 25 pl...

Bertolt Brecht (February 10, 1898 – August 14, 1956) was an influential playwright and poet. His poetry is collected in Poems 1913-1956 (1997) and Poetry and Prose: Bertolt Brecht (2003). He wrote a wide variety of poetry, including occasional poems, poems he set to music and performed, songs and poems for his plays, personal poems recording anecdotes and thoughts, and political poems. Poet Michae...

Today’s poem is a walking song composed by Bilbo Baggins, reworked and repurposed at several key moments in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings . 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 piece of uncollected verse from one of the world’s most beloved children’s writers: Dr. Seuss. Theodor Seuss Geisel (March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991) was an American children's author and cartoonist. He is known for his work writing and illustrating more than 60 books under the pen name Dr. Seuss. His work includes many of the most popular children's books of all time, selling...

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 firs...

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...

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. Aft...

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 poet...

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...

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...

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 Dev...

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.sub...