The Daily Poem

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 syntax into distinctive, emotionally compelling verse. Trained in classical Latin and Greek and currently living in Athens, she brings a wide knowledge of Greco-Roman literature, art, and mythology to bear on her imaginative explorations of contemporary circumstances and concerns. In Hapax (2006), Stallings imbues figures and events from classical drama and mythology with a modern sensibility. "First Love," written as a multiple-choice quiz, intertwines the Persephone myth with a chilling account of infatuation, and "XII Klassikal Lymnaeryx" emphasizes the satiric edge to Greek myth through a series of limericks in witty, unexpected diction. For her ambitious translation of De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things, 2007), Stallings rendered Lucretius's epic-length treatise on the nature of reality into rhyming fourteeners. The unusual meter and colloquial language she employs capture every cadence of Lucretius's enthusiasm for his subject while also making the complexities of his argument easily understandable. Through her technical dexterity and graceful fusion of content and form, Stallings is revealing the timelessness of poetic expression and antiquity's relevance for today.-bio via MacArthur 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

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, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

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 of essays Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950 (1969) was praised as one of the first comprehensive overviews of American poetry from the latter half of the 20th century. First and foremost a poet, Howard’s many volumes of verse also received widespread acclaim; he won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection Untitled Subjects. His other honors included the American Book Award, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the PEN Translation Medal, the Levinson Prize, and the Ordre National du Mérite from the French government. For many years, Howard was the poetry editor of the Paris Review.Evaluations of Howard usually judge his work as a poet to be his most important contribution to contemporary American literature. However, his work has and continues to attract a wide and enthusiastic audience among readers, academics, and critics alike.-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

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 nature of human consciousness. His collection Time & Money (1996) won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Matthews’s other honors and awards included fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. He was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize in 1997.-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

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 popularity of these works was supported for over a century by year-round performances of them, in Britain and abroad, by the repertory company that Gilbert, Sullivan and their producer Richard D'Oyly Carte founded, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. These Savoy operas are still frequently performed in the English-speaking world and beyond.Gilbert's creative output included over 75 plays and libretti, and numerous short stories, poems and lyrics, both comic and serious. After brief careers as a government clerk and a lawyer, Gilbert began to focus, in the 1860s, on writing light verse, including his Bab Ballads, short stories, theatre reviews and illustrations, often for Fun magazine. He also began to write burlesques and his first comic plays, developing a unique absurdist, inverted style that would later be known as his "topsy-turvy" style. He also developed a realistic method of stage direction and a reputation as a strict theatre director. In the 1870s, Gilbert wrote 40 plays and libretti, including his German Reed Entertainments, several blank-verse "fairy comedies", some serious plays, and his first five collaborations with Sullivan: Thespis, Trial by Jury, The Sorcerer, H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. In the 1880s, Gilbert focused on the Savoy operas, including Patience, Iolanthe, The Mikado, The Yeomen of the Guard and The Gondoliers.In 1890, after this long and profitable creative partnership, Gilbert quarrelled with Sullivan and Carte concerning expenses at the Savoy Theatre; the dispute is referred to as the "carpet quarrel". Gilbert won the ensuing lawsuit, but the argument caused hurt feelings among the partnership. Although Gilbert and Sullivan were persuaded to collaborate on two last operas, they were not as successful as the previous ones. In later years, Gilbert wrote several plays, and a few operas with other collaborators. He retired, with his wife Lucy, and their ward, Nancy McIntosh, to a country estate, Grim's Dyke. He was knighted in 1907. Gilbert died of a heart attack while attempting to rescue a young woman to whom he was giving a swimming lesson in the lake at his home.Gilbert's plays inspired other dramatists, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, and his comic operas with Sullivan inspired the later development of American musical theatre, especially influencing Broadway librettists and lyricists. According to The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Gilbert's "lyrical facility and his mastery of metre raised the poetical quality of comic opera to a position that it had never reached before and has not reached since".-bio via Wikipedia 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 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 remembered for his association with the Fugitives and Southern Agrarians, writers who critiqued modern industrial life by invoking romanticized versions of Southern history and culture. Tate’s best-known poems, including “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” confronted the relationship between an idealized past and a present he believed was deficient in both faith and tradition. Despite his commitment to developing a distinctly Southern literature, Tate’s many works frequently made use of classical referents and allusions; his early writing was profoundly influenced by French symbolism and the poetry and criticism of T.S. Eliot. During the 1940s and 1950s, Tate was an important figure in American letters as editor of the Sewanee Review and for his contributions to other midcentury journals such as the Kenyon Review. As a teacher, he influenced poets including Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Theodore Roethke, and he was friends with Hart Crane, writing the introduction to Crane’s White Buildings (1926). From 1951 until his retirement in 1968, Tate was a professor of English at the University of Minnesota.In the decades that he was most active, Tate’s “influence was prodigious, his circle of acquaintances immense,” noted Jones in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. James Dickey could write that Tate was more than a “Southern writer.” Dickey went on, “[Tate’s] situation has certain perhaps profound implications for every man in every place and every time. And they are more than implications; they are the basic questions, the possible solutions to the question of existence. How does each of us wish to live his only life?”Allen Tate won numerous honors and awards during his lifetime, including the Bollingen Prize and a National Medal for Literature. He was the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress and president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.-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 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