The Daily Poem

David Wojahn grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. He studied at the University of Minnesota and the University of Arizona. Ever since his first collection, Icehouse Lights, was chosen for the Yale Series …

A little light verse for anyone who wants to rise (far) above the noise for a moment. Happy reading.

Bert Leston Taylor (November 13, 1866 – March 19, 1921) was an American columnist, humorist, poet, …

Death has been personified and analogized in myriad ways, but none perhaps so withering as today’s imagining of death as a fascist bureaucrat. Happy reading.

Jeanne Murray Walker was born in a village of 900 people in northern Minnesota. She was first published by The Atlantic Monthly at age 19. Today she’s the prize-winning author of nine books of poetry…

Today’s poem is a comical maxim that typifies the heavy lifting light verse is capable of. Happy reading.

Poet Timothy Murphy was born in Hibbing, Minnesota, and graduated from Yale University, where he participated in the Scholar of the House program. He was a partner in a large-scale hog farm and a bus…

Today’s poem has become one of the most famous 20th-century war poems–in part because of its ability to grant fallen soldiers a voice that is earnestly patriotic without becoming jingoistic. Perhaps …

Today’s poem is a Heaney favorite, and goes out to all of the couples tying the knot this summer. Happy reading!

The uniting, in today’s poem, of Spring and sadness is not immediately intuitive. However, it makes more natural sense amidst the many partings and reminiscences of graduation season. Happy reading.

Today’s poem shows us a teacher wrestling with the notion of “graduation.” Happy reading.

Bill Knott was born on February 17, 1940, in Carson City, Michigan. When he was seven years old, his mother di…

Today’s poem explains why some Australians wear beards.

Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson, CBE (17 February 1864 – 5 February 1941) was an Australian bush poet, journalist and author, widely considered o…

Fernando Valverde (Granada, 1980) has been voted the most relevant Spanish-language poet born since 1970 by nearly two hundred critics and researchers from more than one hundred international univers…

Today’s poem goes out to all the mothers–we wouldn’t be here without you! Happy reading.

Marya Zaturensky, Russian-born American poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, was born on September 12, 1902, in Kiev…

Today’s poem is one of the few enduring works of a poet and playwright who burned brightly during his heyday and then blinked out almost entirely. Happy reading.

Leigh, son of James Mathews Leigh, was…

Today’s poem owes a strong debt to Cowper’s “The Poplar Field” but also features a few stylistic echoes of Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” all while achieving a (superior?) effect of its own. Happy reading.

“As for man, his days are like grass.” It isn’t much of a stretch, then, when Cowper sees his own mortality in a grove of felled poplars. Happy reading.

William Cowper (1731-1800) was a renowned 18th …

“The work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull.” -Roger Scruton

Larry Richman (1934-2023) was born in Philadelphia and grew up on a small Buck…

Though J. R. R. Tolkien translated portions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, he did not live to complete the project. Fortunately another Inkling, Nevill Coghill, succeeded where Tolkien could not, and…

Today’s poem has a way of reaching out and grabbing you. Happy reading.

Today’s poem–in which men and women are the two halves of a bell’s tone–voices the rhythms and joys of life in an unconventional way that has to be heard and understood with the body before the mind.…