The Daily Poem

Today’s poem is for all those already wondering what they will do when the baseball season ends next month. 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

Richard Wilbur was born in New York City on March 1, 1921 and studied at Amherst College before serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. He later attended Harvard University.Wilbur’s first book of poems, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (Reynal & Hitchcock) was published in 1947. Since then, he has published several books of poems, including Anterooms: New Poems and Translations (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010); Collected Poems, 1943–2004 (Harvest Books, 2004); Mayflies: New Poems and Translations (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000); New and Collected Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Mind-Reader: New Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translations (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969); Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961); Things of This World (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Ceremony and Other Poems (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950).Wilbur also published numerous translations of French plays—specifically those of the seventeenth century French dramatists Molière and Jean Racine—as well as poetry by Paul Valéry, François Villon, Charles Baudelaire, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, and others. Wilbur is also the author of several books for children and a few collections of prose pieces, and has edited such books as Poems of Shakespeare (Penguin Books, 1966) and The Complete Poems of Poe (Dell Publishing Company, 1959).About Wilbur’s poems, one reviewer for the Washington Post said, “Throughout his career Wilbur has shown, within the compass of his classicism, enviable variety. His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection.”Among Wilbur’s honors are the Wallace Stevens Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Frost Medal, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Bollingen Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Ford Foundation Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, the National Arts Club medal of honor for literature, two PEN translation awards, the Prix de Rome Fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Award. He was elected a chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques and is a former poet laureate of the United States.Wilbur served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1961 to 1995. He died on October 15, 2017 in Belmont, Massachusetts.-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

Cullen’s exact birthplace is unknown, but in 1918, at the age of 15, Countee LeRoy was adopted by Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the minster to the largest church congregation in Harlem.Cullen kept his finger on the pulse of Harlem during the 1920s while he attended New York University and then a graduate program at Harvard. His poetry became popular during his student years, especially his prize-winning poem “The Ballad of a Brown Girl.” In 1925, he published his first volume of poetry entitled Color. Within the next few years, Cullen became well-known, publishing several books and winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928 (to write poetry in France).At first, Cullen was critical of Langston Hughes’ poetry, writing that, in using jazz rhythms in his poetry, Hughes was erecting barriers between race instead of removing them. In his own poetry, Cullen sought to erase these boundaries and took traditionalist poets, such as Keats and A.E. Housman, as models for his own poetry. However, despite his criticisms of other black poets, the majority of Cullen’s own verses confront racial issues.By the 1930s, Cullen’s influence had waned, though he continued to publish prolifically, including novels, a collection of poems for children, the autobiography of his cat, and an adaption of his novel God Sends Sunday into a Broadway musical.-bio via Song of America 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, the inimitably magnanimous Dr. Johnson eulogizes the man of “The single talent well employed.” Happy birthday to the good doctor, and happy reading to the rest. 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 passage of blank verse from Act 5, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s King Lear. In the action of the play the scene is a prelude to tragedy, but as a picture of love between father and daughter it is almost perfect. 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

Some Mondays call for a poem that is uncomplicated and perfectly delightful–and Milne never disappoints. 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

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English journalist, novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.Kipling's works of fiction include the Jungle Book duology (The Jungle Book, 1894; The Second Jungle Book, 1895), Kim (1901), the Just So Stories (1902) and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His poems include "Mandalay" (1890), "Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), and "If—" (1910). He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story. His children's books are classics; one critic noted "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".Kipling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the United Kingdom's most popular writers. Henry James said "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known." In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and at 41, its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both. Following his death in 1936, his ashes were interred at Poets' Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey.-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

There comes a point in every life when “birthday” goes from meaning "pizza party” to meaning “memento mori.” Today’s poem goes out to everyone in the latter group. 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 the age-old question of loss and grief is answered…by the man who raised it in the first place. 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

Nelson is likely best known for her literary output as a poet. She regularly published in Opportunity and Crisis magazines between 1917 and 1928. Her poems also appeared in James Weldon Johnson’s seminal anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931). Nelson began to keep a personal diary in 1921. Her entries from 1926 to 1931 were later edited by scholar Gloria T. Hull for a volume entitled Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (W. W. Norton, 1984).Toward the end of her public career, Nelson focused on journalism and public speaking. She gave numerous speeches as the executive secretary of the American Friends Inter-Racial Peace Committee from 1928 to 1931. From 1926 to 1930, Nelson wrote newspaper columns and became an activist for women’s suffrage and civil rights. In 1922, she advocated for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, and helped establish the Industrial School for Colored Girls in Delaware. One of her speeches was published and included in Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence (The Bookery Publishing Company, 1914), and examples of her dialect poetry, dramatic prose, and oratory were collected The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer (J. L. Nichols & Co., 1920). Both are anthologies that Nelson edited. -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