The Daily Poem

Today’s poem is by Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849 – November 19, 1887), an American author of poetry, prose, and translations, as well as an activist for Jewish and Georgist causes. She is remembered for writing the sonnet"The New Colossus", which was inspired by the Statue of Liberty, in 1883.[1] Its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque, installed in 1903,[2] on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.[3] Lazarus was involved in aiding refugees to New York who had fled antisemitic pogroms in eastern Europe, and she saw a way to express her empathy for these refugees in terms of the statue.[4] The last lines of the sonnet were set to music by Irving Berlin as the song "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor" for the 1949 musical Miss Liberty, which was based on the sculpting of the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World). The latter part of the sonnet was also set by Lee Hoiby in his song "The Lady of the Harbor" written in 1985 as part of his song cycle "Three Women".

Lazarus was also the author of Poems and Translations (New York, 1867); Admetus, and other Poems(1871); Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life (Philadelphia, 1874); Poems and Ballads of Heine (New York, 1881); Poems, 2 Vols.; Narrative, Lyric and Dramatic; as well as Jewish Poems and Translations.[5]

—Bio via Wikipedia

Today’s poem is by Walter Whitman Jr. (/ˈhwɪtmən/; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892), an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American history. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse.[1]

Whitman's major poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was financed with his own money and became well known. The work was an attempt to reach out to the common person with an American epic. Whitman continued expanding and revising Leaves of Grass until his death in 1892.

His poetry often focused on both loss and healing. On the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who Whitman greatly admired, he authored two poems "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", and gave a series of lectures on Lincoln.

—Bio via Wikipedia

Today’s poem is Thomas Lux (December 10, 1946 – February 5, 2017), an American poet who held the Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne, Jr. Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology and ran Georgia Tech's "Poetry @ Tech" program.[1][2] He wrote fourteen books of poetry.[3]

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Today’s poem is by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886), an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry.[2] Despite Dickinson's prolific writing, only ten poems and a letter were published during her lifetime. After her younger sister Lavinia discovered the collection of nearly 1800 poems, Dickinson's first volume was published four years after her death. Until Thomas H. Johnson published Dickinson's Complete Poems in 1955,[130] Dickinson's poems were considerably edited and altered from their manuscript versions. Since 1890 Dickinson has remained continuously in print.

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Today’s poem is by Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966), an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements.

—Bio via Wikipedia

Today’s poem is by Alicia Elsbeth Stallings (born July 2, 1968), an American poet, translator, and essayist.

Stallings has published five books of original verse: Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), Olives (2012), Like (2018), and This Afterlife (2022). She has published verse translations of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) and Hesiod's Works and Days, both with Penguin Classics, and a translation of The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice.

She has been awarded the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship,[2] a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship[3] and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry[4] and the National Book Critics Circle Award.[5] Stallings is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.[6] On June 16, 2023, she was named the University of Oxford's 47th Professor of Poetry.[7][8]

—Bio via Wikipedia

Today’s poem is by Musō Soseki (夢窓 疎石, 1275 – October 20, 1351), a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and teacher, and a calligraphist, poet and garden designer. The most famous monk of his time, he is also known as Musō Kokushi (夢窓国師, "national [Zen] teacher Musō"), an honorific conferred on him by Emperor Go-Daigo.[1] His mother was the daughter of Hōjō Masamura (1264–1268), seventh Shikken (regent) of the Kamakura shogunate.

—Bio via Wikipedia

Today’s poem is by Scott Cairns. Cairns is the author of ten collections of poetry, one collection of translations of Christian mystics, one spiritual memoir (now translated into Greek and Romanian), a book-length essay on suffering, and co-edited The Sacred Place with Scott Olsen, an anthology of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. It won the inaugural National Outdoor Book Award (Outdoor Literature category) in 1997. He wrote the libretto for "The Martyrdom of Saint Polycarp", an oratorio composed by JAC Redford, and the libretto for "A Melancholy Beauty", an oratorio composed by Georgi Andreev. Cairns's poems have appeared in journals including The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Image, and Poetry, and have been anthologized in Upholding Mystery (Oxford University Press, 1996), Best Spiritual Writing (Harper Collins, 1998 and 2000), and Best American Spiritual Writing (Houghton Mifflin, 2004, 2005, and 2006).

—Bio via Wikipedia

Today’s poem is by Kathleen Norris (born July 27, 1947), an American poet and essayist. She is the author Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, The Cloister Walk (1996), The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and "Women's Work" (1998), and other books.

Today’s poem is by Theodore Huebner Roethke (/ˈrɛtki/ RET-kee;[1] May 25, 1908 – August 1, 1963), an American poet. He is regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential poets of his generation, having won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book The Waking, and the annual National Book Award for Poetry on two occasions: in 1959 for Words for the Wind,[2] and posthumously in 1965 for The Far Field.[3][4] His work was characterized by its introspection, rhythm and natural imagery.

Roethke was praised by former U.S. Poet Laureate and author James Dickey as "in my opinion the greatest poet this country has yet produced."[5] He was also a respected poetry teacher, and taught at the University of Washington for fifteen years. His students from that period won two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry and two others were nominated for the award. "He was probably the best poetry-writing teacher ever," said poet Richard Hugo, who studied under Roethke.

—Bio via Wikipedia