The Daily Poem

Robert or "Rabbie" Burns (born 25 January 1759, died 21 July 1796) hailed from Alloway, Scotland. Like his father, Burns was a tenant farmer. However, toward the end of his life he became an excise collector in Dumfries, where he died in 1796; throughout his life he was also a practicing poet. His poetry recorded and celebrated aspects of farm life, regional experience, traditional culture, class...

“Rilke’s most immediate and obvious influence has been upon diction and imagery. [He expressed ideas with] physical rather than intellectual symbols. While Shakespeare, for example, thought of the non-human world in terms of the human, Rilke thinks of the human in terms of the non-human, of what he calls Things.” -W.H. Auden This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscr...

James Whitcomb Riley (born October 7, 1849; died July 22, 1916) was author of numerous beloved poetry volumes, and widely known for books such as  The Old Swimmin’-Hole   and   ’Leven More Poems,   Riley Child-Rhymes, Out to Old Aunt Mary’s,  and  An Old Sweetheart.  Born in Indiana in 1849, he was drawn to poetry even before he was able to read. Neglectful of his studies, Riley preferred to take...

In today’s poem, Mary Oliver helps us develop affinity for the unfamiliar. 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

A. E. Stallings is a poet and translator mining the classical world and traditional poetic techniques to craft works that evoke startling insights about contemporary life. In both her original poetry and translations, Stallings exhibits a mastery of highly structured forms (such as sonnets, couplets, quatrains, and sapphics) and consummate skill in creating new combinations of meter, rhyme, and sy...

Poet, Painter, Prophet–Blake “neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for work’y-day men at all, rather for children and angels; himself  ‘a divine child,’ whose playthings were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens and the earth.” - from Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake (1863) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes...

Richard Howard (born Oct 13, 1929, died march 31, 2022) was credited with introducing modern French fiction—particularly examples of the Nouveau Roman—to the American public; his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1984) won a National Book Award in 1984. A selection of Howard’s critical prose was collected in the volume Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1965-2003 , and his collection...

William Procter Matthews III (November 11, 1942 – November 12, 1997) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He earned a BA from Yale and MFA from the University of North Carolina. The author of eleven books of poetry, Matthews earned a reputation as a master of well-turned phrases, wise sayings, and rich metaphors. Much of Matthews’s poetry explores the themes of life cycles, the passage of time, and the n...

Happy Thanksgiving from The Daily Poem! 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 pay tribute, with poems by Andrea Cohen and Elizabeth Alexander, to the indispensable golden wonder. 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

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (18 November 1836 – 29 May 1911) was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for his collaboration with composer Arthur Sullivan, which produced fourteen comic operas. The most famous of these include H.M.S. Pinafore , The Pirates of Penzance and one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre, The Mikado . The pop...

John Orley Allen Tate (November 19, 1899 – February 9, 1979) was a poet, critic, biographer, and novelist. Born and raised in Kentucky, he earned his BA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the only undergraduate to be admitted to the Fugitives, an informal group of Southern intellectuals that included John Crowe Ransom , Donald Davidson , Merrill Moore , and Robert Penn Warren . Tate is now r...

In today’s poem Ted Kooser describes his ideal reader. 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 poems, Walt Whitman welcomes the reader. 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, Marianne Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) gets candid about poetry itself. One of American literature’s foremost poets, Marianne Moore’s poetry is characterized by linguistic precision, keen and probing descriptions, and acute observations of people, places, animals, and art. Her poems often reflect her preoccupation with the relationships between the common and the un...

Today’s poem is Billy Collins’ take on the time-honored poetic trope: the address to the reader. 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 Louis Stevenson (born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson; 13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for works such as Treasure Island , Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , Kidnapped and A Child's Garden of Verses . Born and educated in Edinburgh, Stevenson suffered from serious bronchial trouble for much of his life, but...

The English writer and Anglican cleric John Donne is considered now to be the preeminent metaphysical poet of his time. He was born in 1572 to Roman Catholic parents, when practicing that religion was illegal in England. His work is distinguished by its emotional and sonic intensity and its capacity to plumb the paradoxes of faith, human and divine love, and the possibility of salvation. Donne oft...

Barbara Ras was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and has lived in Costa Rica, Colombia, California, and Texas. She is the author of The Last Skin  (2010), winner of the best poetry award from the Texas Institute of Letters;  One Hidden Stuff (2006); and  Bite Every Sorrow (1998), which was selected by C.K. Williams for the Walt Whitman Award. Of Bite Every Sorrow , C.K. Williams wrote, “the boo...

Ayodeji Malcolm Guite (/ɡaɪt/; born 12 November 1957) is an English poet, singer-songwriter, Anglican priest, and academic. Born in Nigeria to British expatriate parents, Guite earned degrees from Cambridge and Durham universities. His research interests include the intersection of religion and the arts, and the examination of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield, and Briti...

During his lifetime, Ogden Nash (born August 19, 1902; died May 19, 1971) was the most widely known, appreciated, and imitated American creator of light verse, a reputation that has continued after his death. Few writers of light or serious verse can claim the same extensive dissemination of their poems that Nash’s works enjoy, both with and without citation of the author. Certain Nash lines, such...

Remember, Remember – November 5 was Guy Fawkes Day, an occasion full of complicated remembrances. We mark the day with a traditional English lyric and a November meditation from Malcolm Guite. 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 will turn the clocks back this weekend–in fact, many clocks will turn themselves back–and there is no better occasion to meditate with Robert B. Shaw on the ways we keep time and are kept by 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

Stevens moved to Connecticut in 1916, having found employment at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., where he became vice president in 1934. He had also begun to establish an identity for himself outside the worlds of law and business. His first book of poems, Harmonium  (Alfred A. Knopf), published in 1923, exhibited the influences of both the English Romantics and the French Symbolists, and...

Billy Collins spent his tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate launching the Poetry 180 initiative to increase American high school students’ exposure to poetry. In today’s poem he remembers what it was like to be young (and not so young). 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