The Daily Poem

Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in Head Tide, Maine on December 22, 1869 (the same year as W. B. Yeats). His family moved to Gardiner, Maine, in 1870, which renamed “Tilbury Town,” became the backdrop for many of Robinson’s poems. Robinson described his childhood as stark and unhappy; he once wrote in a letter to Amy Lowell that he remembered wondering why he had been born at the age of six. After high school, Robinson spent two years studying at Harvard University as a special student and his first poems were published in the Harvard Advocate.

Robinson privately printed and released his first volume of poetry, The Torrent and the Night Before, in 1896 at his own expense; this collection was extensively revised and published in 1897 as The Children of the Night. Unable to make a living by writing, he got a job as an inspector for the New York City subway system. In 1902, he published Captain Craig and Other Poems. This work received little attention until President Theodore Roosevelt wrote a magazine article praising it and Robinson. Roosevelt also offered Robinson a sinecure in a U.S. Customs House, a job he held from 1905 to 1910. Robinson dedicated his next work, The Town Down the River (1910), to Roosevelt.

Robinson’s first major success was The Man Against the Sky (1916). He also composed a trilogy based on Arthurian legends: Merlin (1917), Lancelot (1920), and Tristram (1927), which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1928. Robinson was also awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems (1921) in 1922 and The Man Who Died Twice (1924) in 1925. For the last twenty-five years of his life, Robinson spent his summers at the MacDowell Colony of artists and musicians in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Robinson never married and led a notoriously solitary lifestyle. He died in New York City on April 6, 1935.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Today’s classic poem from W. B. Yeats doubles as one of the greatest literary justifications for committing poems to memory. Happy reading!

Today’s poems pay tribute to the soulful and spirited Edna St. Vincent Millay, first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. They are “First Fig,” “Second Fig,” and “Thursday,” all from her collection, A Few Figs From Thistles.

Poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892. In 1912, Millay entered her poem “Renascence” to The Lyric Year’s poetry contest, where she won fourth place and publication in the anthology. This brought her immediate acclaim and a scholarship to Vassar College, where she continued to write poetry and became involved in the theater. In 1917, the year of her graduation, Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems (Harper, 1917). At the request of Vassar’s drama department, she also wrote her first verse play, The Lamp and the Bell (1921), a work about love between women.

After graduating from Vassar, Millay moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village, where she lived with her sister, Norma, in a nine-foot-wide attic. Millay published poems in Vanity Fair, the Forum, and others while writing short stories and satire under the pen name Nancy Boyd. She and Norma acted with the Provincetown Players in the group’s early days, befriending writers such as poet Witter Bynner, critic Edmund Wilson, playwright and actress Susan Glaspell, and journalist Floyd Dell. Millay published A Few Figs from Thistles (Harper & Brothers, 1920), a volume of poetry which drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism. In 1923, Millay was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (Flying Cloud Press, 1922). In addition to publishing three plays in verse, Millay also wrote the libretto of one of the few American grand operas, The King’s Henchman (Harper & Brothers, 1927).

Millay married Eugen Boissevain in 1923, and the two were together for twenty-six years. Boissevain gave up his own pursuits to manage Millay’s literary career, setting up the readings and public appearances for which Millay grew famous. 

Edna St. Vincent Millay died at the age of fifty-eight on October 18, 1950, in Austerlitz, New York.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

In today’s poem one great poet pays passionate tribute to another.

The full title of today’s poem from Maurice Manning says it all: “A Brief Refutation of the Rumor That I Allowed Willie and Tad to Relieve Themselves in my Up-Turned Hat on a Sunday Morning at the Office While Their Mother was Attending Religious Services”

Maurice Manning (born 1966) is an American poet. His first collection of poems, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Award, chosen by W.S. Merwin. Since then he has published four collections of poetry (with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Copper Canyon Press). He teaches English and Creative Writing at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where he oversees the Judy Gaines Young Book Award, and is a member of the poetry faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. Today’s poem comes from his 2020 collection, Railsplitter.

-bio via Wikipedia

James Matthew Wilson has published ten books, among them four collections of poems, including The Strangeness of the Good. His poems, essays, and reviews appear regularly in a wide range of magazines and journals. The winner of the 2017 Hiett Prize from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, Wilson also serves as Poet-in-Residence of the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Worship, poetry editor of Modern Age magazine, and series editor of Colosseum Books, a new imprint that publishes the best contemporary poetry and literary criticism of serious craft and spiritual depth.

-bio via University of St. Thomas, Houston

Today’s poem comes from Rilke and has a fairly straight-forward title–or does it?

Today’s poem from Ben Jonson (also know by its first line, “Drink to me only with thine eyes”) has been arranged and set to music numerous times, and become so familiar that it is often recognizable even to those who no longer associate it with Jonson himself.

Jonson’s circle of admirers and friends, who called themselves the “Tribe of Ben,” met regularly at the Mermaid Tavern and later at the Devil’s Head. Among his followers were nobles such as the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle, as well as writers, including Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Sir John Suckling, James Howell, and Thomas Carew. Most of his well-known poems include tributes to friends, notably Shakespeare, John Donne, and Francis Bacon.

When Jonson died in 1637, a tremendous crowd of mourners attended his burial at Westminster Abbey. He is regarded as one of the major dramatists and poets of the seventeenth century.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

Today’s poem from Pablo Neruda is characteristic of the passionate Chilean’s emphatic love poetry, but more chaste and decorous than some of his verses–perfect for a day that somehow manages to celebrate romance and the beheading of an Italian saint simultaneously.

Today’s poem comes from a young John Donne. Long before he became a serious clergyman writing Holy Sonnets for God, he was a young rake writing saucy sophistries like this one for the ladies.