The Daily Poem

Mondays go down easier with Mary Oliver. 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 selections are characteristic passages from (maybe) the greatest and (certainly) strangest poem in Lyrical Ballads –Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner . Happy reading. ( Nota bene : If you are ready for your own copy of Lyrical Ballads , the Oxford World Classics edition is a great way to see the developments across early editions.) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with oth...

While you can count on one hand the poems Coleridge contributed to Lyrical Ballads , they are some of the most memorable in the collection. Today’s poem uses an abstract description to conjure a very concrete social evil–the state of British prisons at the end of the long 18th century. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bo...

We begin a week of selections from Lyrical Ballads with today’s nostalgic and pastoral poem, “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798.” Happy reading! Jonathan Kerr of the Wordsworth Trust writes about the revolutionary context of the Lyrical Ballads and the revolutionary nature of the project itself: “Wordsworth and Coleridge’...

What do Hilaire Belloc and a scorpion have in common? 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

Oliver Goldsmith (born Nov. 10, 1730, Kilkenny West, County Westmeath, Ire.—died April 4, 1774, London) was an Anglo-Irish essayist, poet, novelist, dramatist, and eccentric, made famous by such works as the series of essays The Citizen of the World, or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher (1762), the poem The Deserted Village (1770), the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and the play She Stoops...

Today’s poems (too lovely to keep behind the paywall) come from Edwin Muir and Denise Levertov and both marvel at different aspects of the same great 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

As the long, exhausting march toward summer begins for many students, the wise and compassionate David Wagoner takes us to the intersection of love and weakness. Happy reading. David Wagoner was recognized as the leading poet of the Pacific Northwest, often compared to his early mentor Theodore Roethke, and highly praised for his skillful, insightful and serious body of work. He won numerous prest...

Sarah Lindsay was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and earned her BA from St. Olaf College and MFA from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. She is the author of the full-length poetry collections Primate Behavior (Grove Press, 1997), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, Mount Clutter (Grove Press, 2002), Twigs and Knucklebones (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), and Debt to the Bone-Eatin...

Siegfried Sassoon was born on 8 September 1886 in Kent. His father was part of a Jewish merchant family, originally from Iran and India, and his mother part of the artistic Thorneycroft family. Sassoon studied at Cambridge University but left without a degree. He then lived the life of a country gentleman, hunting and playing cricket while also publishing small volumes of poetry. In May 1915, Sass...

“The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in s...

The life of this week’s final Scriblerian, Thomas Parnell, rounds out the picture of the entire Scriblerus club as a fraternity of wildly brilliant men all carrying some great pain or wound. Some of them clearly write out of that wound, while others seem to write in spite of it. Parnell straddles the line, and today’s poem is a fine example of his blending of bright energy with a sharp edge. Happy...

Today’s poem throws unambiguous shade on one of 18th-century England’s most divisive politicians, and marks out Swift as one of the gutsiest Scriblerians. 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

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was notorious for embroiling himself in literary-political controversy–his sharp pen writing scathing checks his 4’6” frame couldn’t necessarily cash. Today’s poem is selected from his response to a friend who suggested he tone it down. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dai...

Great poets write as much by ear as by sight, and often turn to sonic phenomena for inspiration. The ringing of bells is one of the most time-honored of those sounds, and in today’s poem Wilbur deepens the sound-image through the added dimension of distance. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoe...

Today’s poem runs the gamut of Italian renaissance poetry, the Book of Common Prayer, and the depths and heights of the human soul. It opens with an allusion to the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti, turns to the Purgatorio of Cavalcanti’s great disciple, Dante, and draws in the Anglican penitential office and lectionary readings for Ash Wednesday, all while following Eliot’s speaker through despair i...

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 American Spiritual Writing . He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006,...

Today’s poem finds the meeting place between the bump on the log and the one on the camel. 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 plays nicely against Hughes’ more famous meditation on “dreams” (the deferred kind, in “ Harlem ”). Rather than emphasizing the danger of a dream under pressure, here he stresses the importance of a dream to men and women under pressure. 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.sub...

Today’s poem features a simple but satisfying sleight of hand. Happy reading. Richard Henry Horne (1802-1884), poet, was born on 31 December 1802 at Edmonton, near London, the eldest of three sons of James Horne (d.1810), quarter-master in the 61st Regiment; his grandfather was Richard Horne, secretary to Earl St Vincent. Richard was brought up at the home of his rich paternal grandmother and atte...

Today’s poem is the best-remembered work of the beloved “nonsense poet” Edward Lear–a silly lyric about a serious love. The episode also features a few guest readers. Happy reading. Edward Lear, the British poet and painter known for his absurd wit, was born on May 12, 1812, in Highgate, England, a suburb of London, and began his career as an artist at age fifteen. His father, a stockbroker of Dan...

Today’s poem will leave you “knowing very well what it was all about.” Happy reading. Gary Soto was born in Fresno, California on April 12, 1952, to working-class Mexican American parents. As a teenager and college student, he worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, chopping beets and cotton and picking grapes. He was not academically motivated as a child, but he became interested in poetr...

Today’s poem is a meditation on speech in the voice of a president. Perfect for an obligatory federal holiday. 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 looks back on a lifetime of maturing love. 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, reminiscent of yesterday’s “From a Railway Carriage,” was written by Auden for use in the 1936 documentary short film, Night Mail , and combines the powerful deep magics of locomotive travel and receiving letters. Bon voyage ! 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