Poet and translator Henry Taylor was born in Lincoln, Virginia on June 21, 1942. He earned a BA from the University of Virginia and an MA from Hollins University. Taylor’s many poetry collections include Crooked Run (2006); Understanding Fiction: Poems 1986-1996; The Flying Change (1985), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize; An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards (1975); and The Horse Show at Midnight(1966). He has translated works from Bulgarian, French, Hebrew, Italian, and Russian. His translations include Black Book of the Endangered Species (1999) by the Bulgarian poet Vladimir Levchev and Electra (1988) by Sophocles. Taylor is a professor of literature and codirector of the MFA program in creative writing at American University in Washington, DC. In 2001 he was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

After winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his book, The Flying Change: Poems, poet Henry Taylor remarked to Joseph McLellan of the Washington Post: “The Pulitzer has a funny way of changing people’s opinions about it. If you haven’t won one, you go around saying things like ‘Well, it’s all political’ or ‘It’s a lottery’ and stuff like that. I would like to go on record as saying that although I’m deeply grateful and feel very honored, I still believe that it’s a lottery and that nobody deserves it.” Despite his disbelief that he could earn such a prestigious award, the Pulitzer is not the only major prize Taylor has won. His other honors include the Witter Bynner Foundation Poetry Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Golden Crane Award of the Washington Chapter of the American Literary Translators Association.

Taylor also has a sense for the comic. Indeed, the poet has remarked that he was first recognized as the author of several verse parodies, which he submitted to the magazine Sixties. “I was mildly nettled to find that they were better known, at least among poets, than anything else I had done,” Taylor reflects in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. These parodies, along with other poems, appear in the author’s first poetry collection, The Horse Show at Midnight (1966). This book also contains poems concerned with the unavoidable changes people must go through in life, a theme that dominates many of Taylor’s verses. Dillard explains, “Henry Taylor has for all his poetic career been drawn inexorably to questions of time and mutability, of inevitable and painful change in even the most fixed and stable of circumstances.” The conflict between a desire for life to remain constant and predictable and the realization of the necessity for change in the form of aging, personal growth, and death creates a tension in Taylor’s poems that is also present in his other collections, including An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards. Dillard calls this third collection, which contains all the poems previously published in Breakings, Taylor’s “best work” up to that time, “clearly marking growth and progress to match his own changes in the years since The Horse Show at Midnight.”

A lover of horses since his childhood in rural Virginia, Taylor uses an equestrian term for the title of his fifth book of poems, The Flying Change (1985). The name refers to the mid-air change of leg, or lead, a horse may sometimes make while cantering. Several of the poems contained in the collection describe similarly unexpected changes that occur in the course of otherwise predictable lives spent in relaxed, countryside settings. “Thus in the best poems here,” comments New York Times Book Review contributor Peter Stitt, “we find something altogether different from the joys of preppy picnicking. Mr. Taylor seeks for his poetry [a] kind of unsettling change, [a] sort of rent in the veil of ordinary life.” Some examples of this in The Flying Change are the poems “Landscape with Tractor,” in which the narrator discovers a corpse in a field, and “At the Swings,” in which the poet reflects on his cancer-stricken mother-in-law, while pushing his sons on a swing set. Other poems in the book explore the effects of such incidents as a small herd of deer suddenly interrupting the peace of a lazy day in which the narrator has been reflecting on his old age, or the surprise of seeing a horse rip its neck on a barbed wire fence.

A number of critics, like Washington Times reviewer Reed Whittemore, laud Taylor’s calm thoughtfulness in these and other poems, comparing it to the tone of other current poets. “Much contemporary verse is now so flighty,” says Whittemore, “so persistently thoughtless, that in contrast the steadiness of [The Flying Change], its persistence in exploring the mental dimensions of a worthwhile moment, is particularly striking, a calmness in the unsettled poetic weather.” Other critics, like Poetry contributor David Shapiro, also compliment the writer on his sensitivity to the atmosphere of the countryside. “Taylor is a poet of white clapboard houses that have existed ‘longer / than anyone now alive,’” observes Shapiro, who quotes the poet. “That is why Taylor can be such a satisfactory poet,” the reviewer concludes.

Though he has written award-winning verses, Taylor remains under the radar. According to Garrett and others, this is due to Taylor’s nonconformist approach. The critic continues: “In forms and content, style and substance, he is not so much out of fashion as deliberately, determinedly unfashionable. His love of form is (for the present) unfashionable. His sense of humor, which does not spare himself, is unfashionable. His preference for country life, in the face of the fact that the best known of his contemporaries are bunched up in several urban areas, cannot have made them, the others, feel easy about him, or themselves for that matter. They have every good reason to try to ignore him.” Whittemore compares Taylor’s technically well-ordered style and leisurely reflections of life to the poetry of Robert Frost and Howard Nemerov. “Among 20th-century poets,” Whittemore concludes, “Mr. Taylor is ... trying to carry on with this old and honorable, but now unfavored, mission of the art. He enjoys such reflections, reaching (but modestly) for what, remember, we even used to call wisdom.”

Taylor lives and works in Leesburg, Virginia.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Today’s poem is a particularly novel example of an ancient writerly tradition: writing about how hard it is to write. Happy reading.

On February 9, 1874, Amy Lowell was born at Sevenels, a ten-acre family estate in Brookline, Massachusetts. Her family was Episcopalian, of old New England stock, and at the top of Boston society. Lowell was the youngest of five children. Her elder brother Abbott Lawrence, a freshman at Harvard at the time of her birth, went on to become president of Harvard College. As a young girl she was first tutored at home, then attended private schools in Boston, during which time she made several trips to Europe with her family. At seventeen, she secluded herself in the 7,000-book library at Sevenels to study literature. Lowell was encouraged to write from an early age.

In 1887 Lowell, with her mother and sister, wrote Dream Drops or Stories From Fairy Land by a Dreamer, printed privately by the Boston firm Cupples and Hurd. Her poem “Fixed Idea” was published in 1910 by the Atlantic Monthly, after which Lowell published individual poems in various journals. In October of 1912, Houghton Mifflin published her first collection, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass.

Lowell, a vivacious and outspoken businesswoman, tended to excite controversy. She was deeply interested in and influenced by the Imagist movement, led by Ezra Pound. The primary Imagists were Pound, Richard Aldington, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Ford Madox Ford. This Anglo-American movement believed, in Lowell’s words, that “concentration is of the very essence of poetry” and strove to “produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.” Lowell campaigned for the success of Imagist poetry in America and embraced its principles in her own work. She acted as a publicity agent for the movement, editing and contributing to an anthology of Imagist poets in 1915.

Lowell’s enthusiastic involvement and influence contributed to Pound’s separation from the movement. As Lowell continued to explore the Imagist style she pioneered the use of “polyphonic prose” in English, mixing formal verse and free forms. Later she was drawn to and influenced by Chinese and Japanese poetry. This interest led her to collaborate with translator Florence Ayscough on Fir-Flower Tablets in 1921. Lowell had a lifelong love for the poet John Keats, whose letters she collected and whose influence can be seen in her poems. She believed him to be the forbearer of Imagism. Her biography of Keats was published in 1925, the same year she won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection What’s O’Clock (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925).

A dedicated poet, publicity agent, collector, critic, and lecturer, Amy Lowell died on May 12, 1925, at Sevenels.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Today’s poem, subtitled “a nun takes the veil,” is one of Hopkins’ earliest surviving works. Happy reading.

Though its author remained otherwise undistinguished, today's poem–with all its ecstasy, agony, and irony–has become almost as essential to the American experience as baseball itself. Happy reading!

Ernest Lawrence Thayer was born on August 14, 1863, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He graduated with a BA in philosophy from Harvard University in 1885, where he was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club and edited the Harvard Lampoon. 

At Harvard, Thayer met William Randolph Hearst, who would later run the San Francisco Examiner and hire Thayer to write a humorous column for the newspaper. On June 3, 1883, Thayer published what would become his most famous work, the poem "Casey at the Bat," under the pen name Phin. The poem gained popularity after the performer William DeWolf Hopper incorporated a recitation of it into his theatrical and radio performances.

Thayer moved to Santa Barbara, California, in 1912. He died in Santa Barbara on August 21, 1940.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Today’s poem is an appreciation of little things. Happy reading.

Today’s poem celebrates the crisp, cool days of early Autumn as the most hospitable season of the year. Happy reading.

The world-wandering John Masefield waxes Solomonic in today’s poem. Happy reading.

Today’s poem is for everyone who knows that children keep you young, but also know how old you feel while it’s happening.

Hall, taken aback by the success of this poem, expressed some regret that he became “the fellow whose son strapped him into the electric chair,” explaining that its inspiration came from 2 a.m. bottle-feedings that he conducted “with pleasure.” Happy reading.

The title of today’s poem is a mouthful, but it is fittingly emblematic of the poet’s full heart. Happy reading!

Never have rhyming couplets been so full of pathos as in today’s poem, where they symbolize the bond between father and son, tragically cut short.