The Daily Poem

A joyous Eastertide and happy reading to you all! 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

Due to the inconsistencies and ambiguities within his work and the scarcity of information about his personal life, Andrew Marvell has been a source of fascination for scholars and readers since his work found recognition in the early decades of the twentieth century. Born on March 31, 1621, Marvell grew up in the Yorkshire town of Hull, England, where his father, Rev. Andrew Marvell, was a lecturer at Holy Trinity Church and master of the Charterhouse. At age twelve Marvell began his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge. Four years later, two of Marvell’s poems, one in Latin and one in Greek, were published in an anthology of Cambridge poets. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1639, Marvell stayed on at Trinity, apparently to complete a master’s degree. In 1641, however, his father drowned in the Hull estuary and Marvell abandoned his studies. During the 1640s Marvell traveled extensively on the continent, adding Dutch, French, Spanish, and Italian to his Latin and Greek—missing the English Civil Wars entirely.Marvell spent most of the 1650s working as a tutor, first for Mary Fairfax, daughter of a retired Cromwellian general, then for one of Oliver Cromwell’s wards. Scholars believe that Marvell’s greatest lyrics were written during this time. In 1657, due to John Milton’s efforts on his behalf, Marvell was appointed Milton’s Latin secretary, a post Marvell held until his election to Parliament in 1660.A well-known politician, Marvell held office in Cromwell’s government and represented Hull to Parliament during the Restoration. His very public position—in a time of tremendous political turmoil and upheaval—almost certainly led Marvell away from publication. No faction escaped Marvell’s satirical eye; he criticized and lampooned both the court and Parliament. Indeed, had they been published during his lifetime, many of Marvell's more famous poems—in particular, “Tom May's Death,” an attack on the famous Cromwellian—would have made him rather unpopular with royalists and republicans alike.Marvell used his political status to free Milton, who was jailed during the Restoration, and quite possibly saved the elder poet’s life. In the early years of his tenure, Marvell made two extraordinary diplomatic journeys: to Holland (1662–63) and to Russia, Sweden, and Denmark (1663–65). In 1678, after eighteen years in Parliament, Marvell died rather suddenly of a fever. Gossip from the time suggested that the Jesuits (a target of Marvell’s satire) had poisoned him. After his death, he was remembered as a fierce and loyal patriot.Now considered one of the greatest poets of the seventeenth century, Marvell published very little of his scathing political satire and complex lyric verse in his lifetime. Although he published a handful of poems in anthologies, a collection of his work did not appear until 1681, three years after his death, when his nephew compiled and found a publisher for Miscellaneous Poems. The circumstances surrounding the publication of the volume aroused some suspicion: a person named “Mary Marvell,” who claimed to be Marvell’s wife, wrote the preface to the book. “Mary Marvell” was, in fact, Mary Palmer—Marvell’s housekeeper—who posed as Marvell’s wife, apparently, in order to keep Marvell’s small estate from the creditors of his business partners. Her ruse, of course, merely contributes to the mystery that surrounds the life of this great poet.Andrew Marvell died on August 16, 1678.-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

English peer and poet George Gordon Byron was one of the bad boys of the Romantic movement and, by some accounts, the first ‘celebrity.’ Like countless celebrities who would come after, he was embroiled in a number of romantic scandals and never accused of being overly pious (to put it Britishly). Nevertheless, he was moved by a number of stories from the Hebrew scriptures–a response that inspired him to pen an entire collection of poetry and one of the best-known similes in English poetry. 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

Poet, editor, translator, and critic Louis Simpson was born in Jamaica to Scottish and Russian parents. He moved to the United States when he was 17 to study at Columbia University. After his time in the army, and a brief period in France, Simpson worked as an editor in New York City before completing his PhD at Columbia. He taught at colleges such as Columbia University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.A contemporary of confessional poets like Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath, Simpson’s early work followed a familiar arc. In the New York Times Book Review, critic David Orr noted its highlights: “Simpson has followed a path lined with signposts sunk so deep in our nation's poetic terra firma that they've practically become part of the landscape. Those signposts declare that a poet born in or around the 1920s should (1) begin his career writing witty, ironic formal poems bearing the stamp of Eliot and Auden; then (2) abandon that formalism for a more 'natural' free verse approach, while (3) dabbling in surrealism; until (4) finally settling on social, conversational poems in the manner of a man speaking to men.” While Simpson’s early books like The Arrivistes (1949) and A Dream of Governors (1959) show the influence of Auden, they also speak to his horrific experiences in World War II, where he served in the 101st Airborne Division and saw active duty in France, Belgium, and Germany. Simpson’s intense formal control, at odds with the visceral details of soldiering, also earned him comparisons to Wilfred Owen. At the End of the Open Road (1963) won the Pulitzer Prize and marked a shift in Simpson’s poetry as well. In this and later volumes, like Searching for the Ox (1976) and The Best Hour of the Night (1983), Simpson’s simple diction and formally controlled verses reveal hidden layers of meaning.Simpson’s lifelong expatriate status influenced his poetry, and he often uses the lives of ordinary Americans in order to critically investigate the myths the country tells itself. Though he occasionally revisits the West Indies of his childhood, he always keeps one foot in his adopted country. The outsider’s perspective allows him to confront “the terror and beauty of life with a wry sense of humor and a mysterious sense of fate,” wrote Edward Hirsch of the Washington Post. Elsewhere Hirsch described Simpson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, At the End of the Open Road (1963), as “a sustained meditation on the American character,” noting, “The moral genius of this book is that it traverses the open road of American mythology and brings us back to ourselves; it sees us not as we wish to be but as we are.” Collected Poems (1988) and There You Are (1995) focus on the lives of everyday citizens, using simple diction and narratives to expose the bewildering reality of the American dream. Poet Mark Jarman hailed Simpson as “a poet of the American character and vernacular.”A noted scholar and critic, Simpson published a number of literary studies, including Ships Going Into the Blue: Essays and Notes on Poetry (1994), The Character of the Poet (1986), and Three on the Tower: The Lives and Works of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams (1975). Simpson also penned a novel, Riverside Drive (1962), and the autobiographies The King My Father's Wreck (1994) and North of Jamaica (1972).Simpson’s later work included The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems (2003), a collection that spans his 60-year career, and Struggling Times (2009). In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Simpson received numerous awards and accolades, including the Prix de Rome, the Columbia Medal for Excellence, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. He was a finalist for the prestigious Griffin International Poetry Award, and his translation of Modern Poets of France: A Bilingual Anthology (1997) won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.Simposon died in Setauket, New York in 2012.-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

Alfred Edward Housman was born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, England on March 26, 1859 and was the eldest of seven children. A year after his birth, Housman’s family moved to nearby Bromsgrove, where the poet grew up and had his early education. In 1877, he attended St. John’s College, Oxford and received first class honours in classical moderations.Housman became distracted, however, when he fell in love with his roommate, Moses Jackson. He unexpectedly failed his final exams, but managed to pass the final year and later took a position as clerk in the Patent Office in London for ten years.During this time, Housman studied Greek and Roman classics intensively, and, in 1892, he was appointed professor of Latin at University College, London. In 1911, he became professor of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge, a post he held until his death. As a classicist, Housman gained renown for his editions of the Roman poets Juvenal, Lucan, and Manilius, as well as his meticulous and intelligent commentaries, and his disdain for the unscholarly.Housman only published two volumes of poetry during his life: A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Last Poems (1922). The majority of the poems in A Shropshire Lad, his cycle of sixty-three poems, were written after the death of Adalbert Jackson, Housman’s friend and companion, in 1892. These poems center around themes of pastoral beauty, unrequited love, fleeting youth, grief, death, and the patriotism of the common soldier. After the manuscript had been turned down by several publishers, Housman decided to publish it at his own expense, much to the surprise of his colleagues and students.While A Shropshire Lad was slow to gain in popularity, the advent of war, first in the Boer War and then in World War I, gave the book widespread appeal due to its nostalgic depiction of brave English soldiers. Several composers created musical settings for Housman’s work, deepening his popularity.Housman continued to focus on his teaching, but in the early 1920s, when his old friend Moses Jackson was dying, Housman chose to assemble his best unpublished poems so that Jackson might read them. These later poems, most of them written before 1910, exhibit a range of subject and form much greater than the talents displayed in A Shropshire Lad. When Last Poems was published in 1922, it was an immediate success. A third volume, More Poems, was released posthumously in 1936 by his brother, Laurence, as was an edition of Housman’s Complete Poems (1939).Despite receiving acclaim as a scholar and a poet during his lifetime, Housman lived as a recluse, rejecting honors and avoiding the public eye. He died on April 30, 1936 in Cambridge.-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

John Robert Lee was born, and lives in St Lucia. He is the author of three collections of poetry, Elemental, (2008), Collected Poems 1975-2015, (2017), and Pierrot, (2020). His poems are included in a number of international anthologies and periodicals including The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, Poetry Wales, Small Axe, and The Missing Slate. He has also published short stories in anthologies such as The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories, and Facing the Sea. He edited a St. Lucian anthology of poetry and art spanning fifty years, Roseau Valley and other poems, and with his younger colleague Kendel Hippolyte, he compiled and edited an anthology of reviews covering the history of St. Lucian literature and theatre, (Saint Lucian Literature and Theatre: an anthology of reviews. His reviews and columns appear widely, and he produced and presented radio and television programmes in Saint Lucia for many years. -bio via Peepal Tree Press 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 takes the peripheral and makes it the primary. 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 from Ezra Pound (a poet with his own colorful history of exile) is after the style of Li Po, featured last week.Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, on October 30, 1885. He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy, and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917.In 1924, Pound moved to Italy. During this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during World War II. In 1946, he was acquitted, but was declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time), decided to overlook Pound’s political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (New Directions, 1948). After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, on November 1, 1972.Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a Modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and especially T. S. Eliot.Pound’s own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry that derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound’s words, “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.” His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.-bio via American Academy of 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 answers the question you never thought to ask: ‘What do Macbeth and a buzz saw have in common?’ 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

Some poets wind up writing prayers by accident; others do it on purpose. Today’s poems from Robert Herrick–“Grace For a Child” and “His Prayer for Absolution”–are of the latter variety. 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