The Daily Poem

In today’s poem, from Songs of Innocence, we meet William Blake struggling to sort out his theological analogies. 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, also known as “Sonnet 19,” Milton offers a pious alternative to “raging” against the dying of the light. 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 muses on the sweet and awful creation of the poet. 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 song from Ben Jonson’s final play, The Sad Shepherd (1641). 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

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 Society. In the 1960s, she turned her attention to poetry. In 1974 she published a small volume of poetry titled Multitudes, Multitudes; thereafter her work appeared frequently in the New Yorker. Upon the publication of her book of poems The Kingfisher in 1983, she became one of the most highly regarded poets in America. Her other collections include A Silence Opens (1994), Westward (1990), What the Light Was Like (1985), and Archaic Figure (1987). Clampitt received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Clampitt taught at the College of William and Mary, Amherst College, and Smith College.Joseph Parisi, a Chicago Tribune Book World reviewer, called the poet’s sudden success after the publication of The Kingfisher “one of the most stunning debuts in recent memory.” Parisi continued, “throughout this bountiful book, her wit, sensibility and stylish wordplay seldom disappoint.” In one of the first articles to appear after The Kingfisher’s debut, New York Review of Books critic Helen Vendler wrote that “Amy Clampitt writes a beautiful, taxing poetry. In it, thinking uncoils and coils again, embodying its perpetua argument with itself.” Georgia Review contributor Peter Stitt also felt that “The Kingfisher is … in many ways an almost dazzling performance.” In the Observer, Peter Porter described Clampitt as “a virtuoso of the here and the palpable.” Porter ranked her with the likes of Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop.Critics praised the allusive richness and syntactical sophistication of Clampitt’s verse. Her poetry is characterized by a “baroque profusion, the romance of the adjective, labyrinthine syntax, a festival lexicon,” said New York Times Book Review contributor Alfred Corn in an article about Clampitt’s second important collection, What the Light Was Like (1985). Indeed, the poet’s use of vocabulary and syntax is elaborate. “When you read Amy Clampitt,” suggests Richard Tillinghast in the New York Times Book Review, “have a dictionary or two at your elbow.” The poet has, Tillinghast continues, a “virtuoso command of vocabulary, [a] gift for playing the English language like a musical instrument and [a] startling and delightful ability to create metaphor.” Her ability as a poet quickly gained Clampitt recognition as “the most refreshing new American poet to appear in many years,” according to one Times Literary Supplement reviewer.Clampitt’s work is also characterized by erudite allusions, for which she provides detailed footnotes. Times Literary Supplement critic Lachlan Mackinnon compared her “finical accuracy of description and the provision of copious notes at the end of a volume,” to a similar tendency in the work of Marianne Moore. “She is as ‘literary’ and allusive as Eliot and Pound, as filled with grubby realia as William Carlos Williams, as ornamented as Wallace Stevens and as descriptive as Marianne Moore,” observed Corn. Washington Post reviewer Joel Conarroe added Walt Whitman and Hart Crane to this list of comparable poets: “Like Whitman, she is attracted to proliferating lists as well as to ‘the old thought of likenesses,’” wrote Conarroe. “And as in Crane her compressed images create multiple resonances of sound and sense.”What the Light Was Like centers around images of light and darkness. This book is “more chastely restrained than The Kingfisher,” according to Times Literary Supplement contributor Neil Corcoran. Conarroe believed that the poet’s “own imagery throughout [the book] is sensuous (even lush) and specific—in short, Keatsian.” Corn similarly commented that “there are stirring moments in each poem, and an authentic sense of Keats’ psychology.” He opined, however, that “her sequence [‘Voyages: A Homage to John Keats‘] isn’t effective throughout, the reason no doubt being that her high-lyric mode” does not suit narrative as well as a plainer style would.Clampitt’s Archaic Figure (1987) maintains her “idiosyncratic style,” as William Logan called it in the Chicago Tribune. New York Times Book Review contributor Mark Rudman noted the poet’s “spontaneity and humor; she is quick to react, hasty, impulsive, responsive to place—and to space.” In the London Sunday Times, David Profumo further praised Archaic Figure. Taking the example of the poem “Hippocrene,” the critic asserted that this work “demonstrates her new powers of economy, the sureness of her rhythmic touch and the sheer readability of her magnificent narrative skills.” “Amy Clampitt,” concluded Logan, “has become one of our poetry’s necessary imaginations.”Clampitt died in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1994. 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–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 via Poetry Foundation 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, 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 Crane was determined to follow his passion to write.Living in New York City, he associated with many important figures in literature of the time, including Allen Tate, the novelist and short story writer Katherine Anne Porter, E. E. Cummings, and Jean Toomer, but his heavy drinking and chronic instability frustrated any attempts at lasting friendship. An admirer of T. S. Eliot, Crane combined the influences of European literature and traditional versification with a particularly American sensibility derived from Walt Whitman.His major work, the book-length poem, The Bridge, expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical and spiritual significance of America. Like Eliot, Crane used the landscape of the modern, industrialized city to create a powerful new symbolic literature.Hart Crane died by suicide on April 27, 1932, at the age of thirty-two, while sailing back to New York from Mexico.-bio via Academy of American Poets 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 an art scholar and master of ekphrastic poetry) features another classic Hopper painting and a contemplative trip to the movies. Happy reading!Joseph Stanton’s books of poems include A Field Guide to the Wildlife of Suburban O‘ahu, Cardinal Points, Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art, and What the Kite Thinks, Moving Pictures, and Lifelines: Poems for Homer and Hopper. He has published more than 300 poems in such journals as Poetry, Harvard Review, Poetry East, The Cortland Review, Ekphrasis, Bamboo Ridge, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Endicott Studio’s Journal of the Mythic Arts, and New York Quarterly. In 2007, Ted Kooser selected one of Stanton’s poems for his “American Life in Poetry” column.Stanton has edited A Hawai‘i Anthology, which won a Ka Palapala Po‘okela Award for excellence in literature. Two of his other books have won honorable mention Ka Palapala Po‘okela Awards. In 1997 he received the Cades Award for his contributions to the literature of Hawai‘i.As an art historian, Stanton has published essays on Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, Maurice Sendak, Chris Van Allsburg, and many other artists. His most recent nonfiction books are The Important Books: Children’s Picture Books as Art and Literature and Stan Musial: A Biography. He teaches art history and American studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.-bio via Poetry Foundation 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

This week The Daily Poem heads to the movies.Cornelius Eady is the founder of the poetry group Cave Canem and his published collections include Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Omnation Press, 1986), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name (Carnegie Mellon University Press,1991), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; Brutal Imagination (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), a National Book Award finalist; and Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008). 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 both responds to and carries on the work of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes. Happy reading!Allison Adelle Hedge Coke has written seven books of poetry, one book of nonfiction, and a play. Following former fieldworker retraining in the mid-1980s, the much-decorated poet began her writing and teaching career. She now serves as distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.-bio via UC Riverside 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