The Daily Poem

Today’s poem for St. Lucy’s day is a remembrance of a light “too bright for our infirm delight” dawning in the deepest darkness of the year.

The poem is collected in Waiting on the Word: a poem a day for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. You can also hear a vastly superior reading of the poem by the author himself.

Today’s poem–known to many as the musical setting, “In the Bleak Midwinter”–contemplates unprecedented act of loves in the darkest days of the year. Happy reading.

Ezra Pound had his own complicated relationship with fame, exercising a profound influence upon 20th-century literature but being tried for treason in the U.S. after broadcasting propaganda for the fascists during WWII. Today’s poem is a guarded reflection on the never-ending quest. Happy reading.

Today is the birthday of Emily Dickinson, and to mark the occasion we have selected a poem that manages to sum up the entire paradox of the human condition in just two lines. Happy reading.

Mark Strand was born on Canada’s Prince Edward Island on April 11, 1934. He received a BA from Antioch College in Ohio in 1957 and attended Yale University, where he was awarded the Cook Prize and the Bergin Prize. After receiving his BFA degree in 1959, Strand spent a year studying at the University of Florence on a Fulbright fellowship. In 1962 he received his MA from the University of Iowa.

Strand was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Almost Invisible (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Man and Camel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Blizzard of One (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Dark Harbor (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); The Continuous Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Selected Poems (Atheneum, 1980); The Story of Our Lives(Atheneum, 1973); and Reasons for Moving (Atheneum, 1968).

Strand also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century (W. W. Norton, 2005); The Golden Ecco Anthology (Ecco, 1994); The Best American Poetry 1991; and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, co-edited with Charles Simic (HarperCollins, 1976).

Strand’s honors included the Bollingen Prize, a Rockefeller Foundation award, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 2004 Wallace Stevens Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1979, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from the Academy of American Poets, as well as fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.

Strand served as poet laureate of the United States from 1990 to 1991 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1995 to 2000. He taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City.

Mark Strand died at eighty years old on November 29, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Today’s poem pays tribute to the great lover of children and the poor, whose day serves as a festive waystation on the journey to Christmas. Happy reading!

Today’s poem from Williams’ late collection, Pictures from Brueghel, is an ekphrasis on the painting by the same name, and a lesson in disciplined observation. Happy reading.

“We only live, only suspire/ Consumed by either fire or fire.”…are not lines from today’s poem, but one gets the feeling Bradstreet understood their meaning as well as anyone could. Happy reading.

Anne Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in 1612 in Northamptonshire, England. She married Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Cambridge University, at the age of sixteen. Two years later, Bradstreet, along with her husband and parents, immigrated to the American colonies with the Winthrop Puritan group, and the family settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts. There, Bradstreet and her husband raised eight children, and she became one of the first poets to write English verse in the American colonies. It was during this time that Bradstreet penned many of the poems that would be taken to England by her brother-in-law, purportedly without her knowledge, and published in 1650 under the title The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America.

The Tenth Muse was the only collection of Bradstreet’s poetry to appear during her lifetime. In 1644, the family moved to Andover, Massachusetts, where Bradstreet lived until her death in 1672. In 1678, the first American edition of The Tenth Muse was published posthumously and expanded as Several Poems Compiled with Great Wit and Learning. Bradstreet’s most highly regarded work, a sequence of religious poems titled Contemplations, was not published until the middle of the nineteenth century.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

New-fallen snow can be a kind of blank canvas for the poet. In yesterday’s poem, Stevenson wrote over it in whimsical metaphor and simile; in today’s, Longfellow finds the reflection of his own troubled heart. Happy reading.

Today’s poem is a master-class in elementary poetic instruction. Happy reading.