The Daily Poem

In part two, the “Lady” sits, weaving, in a world of images but pines for the world of solid realities.

Today is the first of four in which we’ll wend our way through Tennyson’s tragic Arthurian ballad.

Today’s poem is a shape poem dedicated to chefs, but (surprise?) it might be about more than cooking.

John Hollander, one of contemporary poetry’s foremost poets, editors, and anthologists, grew up in New York City. He studied at Columbia University and Indiana University, and he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. Hollander received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Levinson Prize, a MacArthur Foundation grant, and the poet laureateship of Connecticut. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and he taught at Hunter College, Connecticut Coll...

In today’s poem, from Songs of Innocence, we meet William Blake struggling to sort out his theological analogies.

In today’s poem, also known as “Sonnet 19,” Milton offers a pious alternative to “raging” against the dying of the light. Happy reading.

Today’s poem muses on the sweet and awful creation of the poet. Happy reading!

Today’s poem is a song from Ben Jonson’s final play, The Sad Shepherd (1641). Happy reading.

Just when you thought you were out, The Daily Poem pulls you back in–to poems about movies. Today’s charming and earnest poem imitates the medium it describes (film) by swapping memorable images and sensations for linear propositions. Happy reading.

Amy Clampitt was born and raised in New Providence, Iowa. She studied first at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, and later at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research in New York City. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Clampitt held various jobs at publishers and organizations such as Oxford University Press and the Audubon Soci...

Today’s poem–published in 1920–is one of the early intersections between poetry and cinema. Happy reading.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) is best remembered for his angry and compassionate poems about World War I, which brought him public and critical acclaim. Avoiding the sentimentality and jingoism of many war poets, Sassoon wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and contemptuously satirized generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and blind support of the war. He was also well known as a novelist and political commentator. In 1957 he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry.

-bio v...

In today’s poem, written a century ago, cinema (and Charlie Chaplin) is already supplying metaphors for the work and experience of modern poets. Happy reading.

Harold Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio, and began writing verse in his early teenage years. Though he never attended college, Crane read regularly on his own, digesting the works of the Elizabethan dramatists and poets William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne and the nineteenth-century French poets Charles Vildrac, Jules Laforgue, and Arthur Rimbaud. His father, a candy manufacturer, attempted to dissuade him from a career in poetry, but Cr...