The Daily Poem

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 …

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 celeb…

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.

Today’s poems kick off a week of love poetry with two by the Master.

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was a Fireside Poet, journalist, and nature writer with ties to the Hudson River School of art. He wrote poems, essays, and articles that championed the rights of sl…

Today’s poem is a rare departure for Elizabeth Bishop who usually avoided a confessional style of poetry–but everybody gets a little introspective on their birthday.

Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. From 1997 to 1999 she held…

Today’s poem is the one you had to read in high school without really understanding it. (Or was that just me?)

Among the major Victorian writers, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is unique in that his reput…

Today’s poem is one of the most recognizable and influential American poems of the twentieth century.

Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectua…

Today’s poem from Robert Herrick is not only an ode to the holiday of Candlemas, but a meditation on the everlasting revolution of the seasons.

For more on the history of Groundhog Day and Candlemas, …

If you had to live the same day over and over again, you may as well use the time to memorize some poetry. That’s exactly what Phil Connors does in Groundhog Day. Today’s poem is featured in the film…

Although the early part of Robert Browning’s creative life was spent in comparative obscurity, he has come to be regarded as one of the most important English poets of the Victorian period. His drama…

Today’s poem from Emily Dickinson is a masterclass in poetic economy.

Anne Bradstreet was the first woman to be recognized as an accomplished New World Poet. Her volume of poetry The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America ... received considerable favorable attention w…

Today’s poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, though potentially universal in its application, is ostensibly about Daniel Webster, who alienated abolitionists with his support of the Fugitive Slave Bill i…

Today’s poem is Dana Gioia’s interpretive spin on a Rilke poem about (among other things) poetics.

Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed poet and writer. Former California Poet Laureate and Chair…

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two o…

John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children. Although he died at the age of twenty-five, Keats had perhaps the most remarkable ca…

Poet Christina Rossetti was born in 1830, the youngest child in an extraordinarily gifted family. Her father, the Italian poet and political exile Gabriele Rossetti, immigrated to England in 1824 and…