The Daily Poem

Billy Collins spent his tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate launching the Poetry 180 initiative to increase American high school students’ exposure to poetry. In today’s poem he remembers what it was like to be young (and not so young). 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 and critic Robert B. Shaw earned a BA from Harvard University, where he studied with Robert Lowell, and a PhD from Yale University. Influenced by Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Larkin, Shaw’s wry and plainspoken formal verse is often grounded in, or sprung from, the debris of daily life. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Solving For X (2002), which won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; Below the Surface (1999); and The Wonder of Seeing Double (1988). His criticism appears widely in such places as the New York Times Book Review, and he has also published a critical study of poets John Donne and George Herbert, The Call of God: The Theme of Vocation in the Poetry of Donne and Herbert (1981). Shaw has received Shenandoah’s James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Since 1983, Shaw has taught at Mount Holyoke College as the Emily Dickinson Professor of English.-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

Edward Estlin (E.E.) Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He attended the Cambridge Latin High School, where he studied Latin and Greek. Cummings earned both his BA and MA from Harvard, and his earliest poems were published in Eight Harvard Poets (1917). As one of the most innovative poets of his time, Cummings experimented with poetic form and language to create a distinct personal style. A typical Cummings poem is spare and precise, employing a few key words eccentrically placed on the page. Some of these words were invented by Cummings, often by combining two common words into a new synthesis. He also revised grammatical and linguistic rules to suit his own purposes, using such words as “if,” “am,” and “because” as nouns, for example, or assigning his own private meanings to words. Despite their nontraditional form, Cummings’ poems came to be popular with many readers. “No one else,” Randall Jarrell claimed, “has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader.” By the time of his death in 1962 Cummings held a prominent position in 20th-century poetry. John Logan in Modern American Poetry: Essays in Criticism called him “one of the greatest lyric poets in our language.” Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote in Standards: A Chronicle of Books for Our Time: “Cummings has written at least a dozen poems that seem to me matchless. Three are among the great love poems of our time or any time.” Malcolm Cowley admitted in the Yale Review that Cummings “suffers from comparison with those [poets] who built on a larger scale—Eliot, Aiken, Crane, Auden among others—but still he is unsurpassed in his special field, one of the masters.”-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

Today’s poem is by Dylan Marlais Thomas, born October 27, 1914 in the Welsh seaport of Swansea, Wales. Thomas attended the Swansea Grammar School, where he received all of his formal education. As a student he made contributions to the school magazine and was keenly interested in local folklore. Having declared at the age of eight that he was a poet, he began writing early and published his first book of poetry, 18 Poems (1934), when he was not yet twenty years old. After leaving school, Thomas supported himself as an actor, reporter, reviewer, scriptwriter, and with various odd jobs.By 1938 Thomas’s reputation was growing the United Kingdom, yet he was still basically unknown in the United States until a poem of his appeared in the 1938 anthology New Directions in Poetry and Prose, and two of his earlier poetry volumes were published by James Laughlin under the title The World I Breathe (1939).During World War II, Thomas wrote radio scripts for the Ministry of Information and documentaries for the British government. After the war he became a commentator on poetry for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Thomas continued writing poems, stories, essays, and plays, and in 1950 made the first of four reading tours through the United States, during which he gave more than one hundred poetry readings. In these appearances he half recited, half chanted the lines in what became known as his famous “Welsh singing” voice and inspired generations of modern poets to begin reading their poems in public.Following the extraordinary success of his just-published Collected Poems, Thomas began his final tour of the United States on October 16, 1953. He collapsed at the Chelsea Hotel and fell into a coma on November 5. He died four days later in St. Vincent’s Hospital at the age of thirty-nine. Thomas was buried in the graveyard of St. Martin’s Church, Laugharne, Wales. He is best known for poems like “Do not go gentle into that good night” and the poetic prose work, A Child’s Christmas in Wales.-bio via New Directions 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

Christine Perrin is the director of writing at Messiah College and has taught literature and creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, with Gordon College’s Orvieto Program, through the Pennsylvania Arts Council to students of all ages, and at the local classical school where her children attended. She consults with classical schools in curriculum development and faculty development in poetry and writing, and speaks regularly at the CiRCE Institute as well as the Society for Classical Learning conferences. She is a two-time recipient of the PA Arts Council Artists Fellowship and a Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Fellowship. Perrin is the author of Bright Mirror, a collection of her own poetry, and of The Art of Poetry, a textbook for middle and high school students. Her work also appears in various journals, including The New England Review, Image, TriQuarterly, Blackbird, Christianity and Literature, and The Cresset.-Bio via Classical Academic 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 being St. Crispin’s Day, it seems only right to share, once again, one of the most famous speeches in English literature—Henry V’s “Crispin’s Day” speech which was given prior to the battle of Agincourt, as penned by Shakespeare in his history, Henry V. 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 by Carl August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967), an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as "a major figure in contemporary literature", especially for volumes of his collected verse, including Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel(1920).[2] He enjoyed "unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life".[3] When he died in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson observed that "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America."[4]—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

Today’s poem is by an anonymous poet but it artfully commemorates the life and death of a great historical figure. 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 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (/ˈkoʊlərɪdʒ/ KOH-lə-rij;[1] 21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834), an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He also shared volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd.He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on William Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking cultures. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, including "suspension of disbelief".[2] He had a major influence on Ralph Waldo Emersonand American transcendentalism.—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

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator. His original works include the poems "Paul Revere's Ride", "The Song of Hiawatha", and "Evangeline". He was the first American to completely translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and was one of the fireside poets from New England.Longfellow wrote many lyric poems known for their musicality and often presenting stories of mythology and legend. He became the most popular American poet of his day and had success overseas. He has been criticized for imitating European styles and writing poetry that was too sentimental.—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