The Daily Poem

Today’s poem is T. S. Eliot’s unconventional look at the very familiar story of the Three Wise Men.

Today’s poem is a familiar favorite, just right for the “darkest evening of the year.”

Ruth Moose is the author of Making the Bed (Main Street Rag Press, 2004) and The Sleepwaker (Main Street Rag Press, 2007). Her poetry has been published in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's colu…

Gerard Manley Hopkins is considered to be one of the greatest poets of the Victorian era. However, because his style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were no…

G. K. Chesterton was one of the dominating figures of the London literary scene in the early 20th century. Not only did he get into lively discussions with anyone who would debate him, including his …

Mark Doty is a poet, essayist, memoirist and author of nine books of poetry. His book Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems won the 2008 National Book Award. He has also received other literary awards…

"Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh." -Wystan Hugh Auden

December 13 is St. Lucy’s day, traditionally a day celebrating light in the midst of the darkest, coldest time of the year. Today’s poems–from Elaine Feinstein, John Donne, and Thomas Merton–all medi…

Thomas Hardy (born June 2, 1840 - died January 11, 1928) was born in Dorset, England. The son of a stone mason, he trained as an architect and worked in London and Dorset for ten years.

Hardy began hi…

Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti (March 24, 1919 – February 22, 2021) was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. An author of poetry, transl…

Mary Jo Salter is the author of eight books of poetry including The Surveyors (2017) and, most recently Zoom Rooms: Poems (2022). She is also a lyricist whose song cycle “Rooms of Light: The Life of …

Czesław Miłosz (30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. He primarily wrote his poetry in Polish. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 2…

"The spirit of the smithy is so close to the spirit of song that it has mixed in a million poems, and every blacksmith is a harmonious blacksmith. Even the village children feel that in some dim way …

Robert or "Rabbie" Burns (born 25 January 1759, died 21 July 1796) hailed from Alloway, Scotland. Like his father, Burns was a tenant farmer. However, toward the end of his life he became an excise c…

“Rilke’s most immediate and obvious influence has been upon diction and imagery. [He expressed ideas with] physical rather than intellectual symbols. While Shakespeare, for example, thought of the no…

James Whitcomb Riley (born October 7, 1849; died July 22, 1916) was author of numerous beloved poetry volumes, and widely known for books such as The Old Swimmin’-Hole and ’Leven More Poems, Riley Ch…

In today’s poem, Mary Oliver helps us develop affinity for the unfamiliar.

A. E. Stallings is a poet and translator mining the classical world and traditional poetic techniques to craft works that evoke startling insights about contemporary life. In both her original poetry…

Poet, Painter, Prophet–Blake “neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for work’y-day men at all, rather for children and angels; himself  ‘a divine child,’ whose playthings were sun, moon, and st…

Richard Howard (born Oct 13, 1929, died march 31, 2022) was credited with introducing modern French fiction—particularly examples of the Nouveau Roman—to the American public; his translation of Charl…