The Daily Poem

Today’s poem reminds us how much is sometimes riding on the proper grammatical distinctions.

Born in Cumberland, British Romantic poet and prose writer Dorothy Wordsworth was the third of five children. Her mother died when Wordsworth was six, and she moved to Halifax to live with her aunt. In 1781 she enrolled in Hipperholme Boarding School. When her father died in 1783, the family’s financial situation worsened and the children were sent to live with their uncles. Wordsworth changed schools, entering Miss Medlin’s school, where she first read Milton, Shakespeare, and Homer. She later moved to live with an uncle in Penrith, where she was tutored by yet another uncle, the Reverend William Cookson, who also tutored the sons of King George III. Starting in 1788, Wordsworth lived with Cookson and his new wife, and helped to care for their children.

She remained particularly close to her brother, the poet William Wordsworth, and the siblings lived together in Dorset and Alfoxden before William married her best friend, Mary Hutchinson, in 1802. Thereafter Dorothy Wordsworth made her home with the couple.

An avid naturalist, Wordsworth enjoyed daily nature walks with her brother, and images from the notes she took of these walks often recur in her brother’s poems. Most of her writing explores the natural world.

Although Wordsworth did not publish her work, many of her journals, travelogues, and poems have been posthumously collected and published, including her four-volume Alfoxden journal, which she kept from May 1799 to December 1802, and her journals from 1824 to 1835, which include a travelogue and notes on life at Rydal Mount, where she lived with William and his family beginning in 1813. Wordsworth also wrote several children’s stories.In her later years, she struggled with addictions to opium and laudanum, and her mental health deteriorated. Until his death in 1850, her brother was her main caretaker.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Today’s poem is almost too bright for our infirm delight. Happy reading!

Today’s poem features a failed resurrection and a response that spirals through all the customary stages of grief.

Hilda Doolittle was born on September 10, 1886, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She attended Bryn Mawr College, where she was a classmate of Marianne Moore. Doolittle later enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where she befriended Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.

H.D. published numerous books of poetry, including Flowering of the Rod (Oxford University Press, 1946); Red Roses From Bronze (Random House, 1932); Collected Poems of H.D. (Boni and Liveright, 1925); Hymen (H. Holt and Company, 1921); and the posthumously published Helen in Egypt (Grove Press, 1961). She was also the author of several works of prose, including Tribute to Freud (Pantheon, 1956).

H.D.’s work is characterized by the intense strength of her images, economy of language, and use of classical mythology. Her poems did not receive widespread appreciation and acclaim during her lifetime, in part because her name was associated with the Imagist movement, even as her voice had outgrown the movement’s boundaries, as evidenced by her book-length works, Trilogy and Helen in Egypt. Neglect of H.D. can also be attributed to her time, as many of her poems spoke to an audience which was unready to respond to the strong feminist principles articulated in her work. As Alicia Ostriker said in American Poetry Review, “H.D., by the end of her career, became not only the most gifted woman poet of our century, but one of the most original poets—the more I read her the more I think this—in our language.”

H.D. died in Zurich, Switzerland, on September 27, 1961.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement.

Lewis wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. C. S. Lewis’s most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics in The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and been transformed into three major motion pictures.

-bio via Harper Collins

Find somebody to watch the kids while you giggle through today’s poem. Happy reading.

Respected editor, publisher, writer and poet, Paul Ruffin often relied upon his experiences growing up in the South as a foundation for his stories. 

He was born in Millport, Alabama, and grew up outside Columbus, Mississippi. After serving in the U.S. Army, Ruffin earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at Mississippi State University. 

He took post-graduate courses at the University of Southampton in England and graduated with his doctoral degree from the Center for Writers and the University of Southern Mississippi in 1974. 

He accepted a position at Sam Houston State University where he founded The Texas Review—an international literary journal—and Texas Review Press, a member of the Texas A&M University Press Consortium.

Karla K. Morton, 2010 Texas Poet Laureate, said, “His work at The Texas Review Press elevated the whole of Texas Letters.” 

Throughout the years, Ruffin worked tirelessly to promote the press and its authors, once giving his views on university presses moving toward digital books as opposed to traditional ink-on-paper.

“We’re fulfilling the ancient role of the university press and that is to produce books. I don’t want to give up the book because it is an art,” he said.

During his extensive writing career, he published more than 1,500 poems, 100-plus stories, and more than 90 essays in magazines and journals.  His work also has appeared in numerous anthologies and textbooks. In addition, he wrote a weekly column that appeared in several newspapers in Texas and Mississippi. In 2009, he was named Texas State Poet Laureate.

In a 2009 article in SHSU’s Heritage Magazine, Ruffin was described as someone who “loves football, shooting, riding his tractor, maintaining his truck, and doing his own carpentry, electric, and plumbing work…not exactly the stereotypical image of a person who loves words and is a master of arranging them into beautifully crafted poems and other literary works.” 

-bio via Sam Houston State University

Today’s poem ponders what love makes of language. Happy reading.

A.E. (Alicia) Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (2006); and Archaic Smile (1999), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and she is a frequent contributor to Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement.

Stallings’s poetry is known for its ingenuity, wit, and dexterous use of classical allusion and forms to illuminate contemporary life. In interviews, Stallings has spoken about the influence of classical authors on her own work: “The ancients taught me how to sound modern,” she told Forbes magazine. “They showed me that technique was not the enemy of urgency, but the instrument.”

Stallings's latest verse translation is the pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (2019), in an illustrated edition with Paul Dry Books, and her latest volume of poetry is a selected poems, This Afterlife (2022, FSG). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, the journalist John Psaropoulos. 

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Today’s poem is inspired by one of our favorites here at the Daily Poem.

Librettist, essayist, translator, and author of ten poetry collections, Scott Cairns is Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of Missouri. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014.

His most recent book of poems, Lacunae, is available wherever books are sold.

-bio via Paraclete Press

Ted Kooser, who worked in insurance for thirty-five years before becoming U.S. Poet Laureate, turns 85 today. Many happy returns of the day to him, and happy reading to the rest of you!

Have you measured out your life in coffee spoons? Feeling like a pair of ragged claws today? Afraid to eat messy food while other people are watching? Or are you just channeling a little too much Polonius? If so, today’s poem–the classic modernist anthem of insecurity and isolation (and mermaids)–will feel very familiar. Happy reading!

(And for an even better reading of this poem, you should discover Jeremy Irons reading Eliot’s complete poems.)

Happy birthday to the Bard!

NB: Anyone itching to dig deeper into Shakespeare’s plays should look no further than one of our sister podcasts, The Play’s the Thing!