The Daily Poem

Today’s poem comes from a young John Donne. Long before he became a serious clergyman writing Holy Sonnets for God, he was a young rake writing saucy sophistries like this one for the ladies. 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 kick off a week of love poetry with two by the Master. 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

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was a Fireside Poet, journalist, and nature writer with ties to the Hudson River School of art. He wrote poems, essays, and articles that championed the rights of slaves, workers, and immigrants, and he was frequently published by the North American Review. He is the author of several books, including The White-Footed Deer and Other Poems (I. S. Platt, 1844), and...

Today’s poem is a rare departure for Elizabeth Bishop who usually avoided a confessional style of poetry–but everybody gets a little introspective on their birthday. 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

Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. From 1997 to 1999 she held a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University. Smith is the author of four books of poetry: The Body's Question (2003), which won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet...

Today’s poem is the one you had to read in high school without really understanding it. (Or was that just me?) Among the major Victorian writers, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is unique in that his reputation rests equally upon his poetry and his poetry criticism. Only a quarter of his productive life was given to writing poetry, but many of the same values, attitudes, and feelings that are expressed...

Today’s poem is one of the most recognizable and influential American poems of the twentieth century. Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to...

Today’s poem from Robert Herrick is not only an ode to the holiday of Candlemas, but a meditation on the everlasting revolution of the seasons. For more on the history of Groundhog Day and Candlemas, check out this conversation between Richard Rohlin and Jonathan Pageau . This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoem...

If you had to live the same day over and over again, you may as well use the time to memorize some poetry. That’s exactly what Phil Connors does in Groundhog Day . Today’s poem is featured in the film and marks a significant turning point for the once-misanthropic weatherman. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the premier poet-critic of modern English tradition, distinguished for the scope and influence o...

Although the early part of Robert Browning’s creative life was spent in comparative obscurity, he has come to be regarded as one of the most important English poets of the Victorian period. His dramatic monologues and the psycho-historical epic  The Ring and the Book  (1868-1869), a novel in verse, have established him as a major figure in the history of English poetry. His claim to attention as a...

Today’s poem from Emily Dickinson is a masterclass in poetic economy. 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

Anne Bradstreet was the first woman to be recognized as an accomplished New World Poet. Her volume of poetry The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America ... received considerable favorable attention when it was first published in London in 1650. Eight years after it appeared it was listed by William London in his Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England , and George III is reported to have h...

Today’s poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, though potentially universal in its application, is ostensibly about Daniel Webster, who alienated abolitionists with his support of the Fugitive Slave Bill in 1850. Whittier (December 17, 1807 – September 7, 1892) was an American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Frequently listed as one of the fireside poets, he wa...

Today’s poem is Dana Gioia’s interpretive spin on a Rilke poem about (among other things) poetics. Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed poet and writer. Former California Poet Laureate and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia was born in Los Angeles of Italian and Mexican descent. The first person in his family to attend college, he received a B.A. and M.B.A. from Stanford...

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), and also The Bell Jar , a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poem...

John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children. Although he died at the age of twenty-five, Keats had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet. He published only fifty-four poems, in three slim volumes and a few magazines. But over his short development he took on the challenges of a wide range of poetic forms from th...

Poet Christina Rossetti was born in 1830, the youngest child in an extraordinarily gifted family. Her father, the Italian poet and political exile Gabriele Rossetti, immigrated to England in 1824 and established a career as a Dante scholar and teacher of Italian in London. He married the half-English, half-Italian Frances Polidori in 1826, and they had four children in quick succession: Maria Fran...

Today’s poem from Richard II tells “sad stories of the death of kings” and lowers the curtain on a week of Shakespearean speeches in verse. 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

What do the world’s greatest playwright and Rome’s greatest mama’s boy have in common? Today’s poem–Volumnia pleading with her son in the final Act of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus . 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 lovable cad, Sir John Falstaff, explains the dismal state of his troops (and the extra silver in his pocket). The speech is from Henry IV, Part 1, Act 4, Scene 2. 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 the “anti-To Be or Not To Be” speech from Act 3, Scene 1 of the underrated Measure For Measure. 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 an example of poetry we forget is poetry. Written in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), the opening prologue to Henry V calls the audience’s attention to the tension between the play’s grand and sweeping subject and the theater’s physical limitations. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypo...

Today’s poem comes from Honey and Salt , the last collection Sandburg published before his death. “Trying to write briefly about Carl Sandburg,” said a friend of the poet, “is like trying to picture the Grand Canyon in one black and white snapshot.” His range of interests was enumerated by his close friend, Harry Golden, who, in his study of the poet, called Sandburg “the one American writer who d...

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an American poet, short fiction writer, critic, and accomplished editor known for his gloomy and sometimes grisly subjects. He pioneered the detective story and is remembered as a master of Gothic and Romantic literature. His works have inspired films, themed restaurants, football teams, and at least one bizarre ritual around his grave. This...

Today’s poem is one of the most-anthologized works of light verse in the English language–and just plain fun. Frank Gelett Burgess was an American artist, art critic, poet, author and humorist. An important figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary renaissance of the 1890s, particularly through his iconoclastic little magazine, The Lark, and association with The Crowd literary group. He is bes...