The Daily Poem
An audio anthology of the best poetry ever written
- Update frequency
- every 2 days
- Average duration
- 7 minutes
- Episodes
- 984
- Years Active
- 2019 - 2025
Wendell Berry's "The Thought of Something Else"
Today’s poem, from Berry’s 1969 collection, Openings, doubles as a tribute to one of the loveliest and homiest bookstores in the world. Happy reading.
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John Masefield's "Cargoes"
Today’s poem evokes entire worlds of vivid images and complex emotions with little more than a carefully-crafted list. Happy reading.
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Emily Dickinson's "I fear a Man of frugal Speech"
Today’s poem was written by Dickinson when she was thirty-three and old enough to know. Happy reading.
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William Blake's "The Tyger"
Today’s poem, one of English literature’s most extracted and anthologized, is still best appreciated when read in light of the momentous collection it belongs to.
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Jessica Greenbaum's "A Poem for S."
Today’s poem is also a poem for “ABC”–which is to say, it’s a brilliantly executed example of the alphabetic form known as the abecedarian. Happy reading.
Jessica Greenbaum is the author of Inventing …
Rhina P. Espaillat's "Changeling"
Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. After Espaillat’s great-uncle opposed the regime, her family was exiled to the United States and settl…
Sylvia Plath's "Gold Mouths Cry"
In today’s poem, Plath (who died at 30) contrasts the transience of youth and nature with the seeming permanence of art and artifice. (I even make time for a brief shout-out to a not-so-transitory Go…
from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Hiawatha's Wooing"
Today’s poem is a selection from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s American epic, The Song of Hiawatha. The passage is structured beautifully so that two divergent streams of imaginative thought suddenly …
Charles Wolfe's "The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna"
Today's poem is an enduring memorial for a hastily interred hero.
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Kenneth Grahame's "A Song of Mr. Toad"
Kenneth Grahame (8 March 1859 – 6 July 1932) is best remembered for the classic of children's literature The Wind in the Willows (1908). Scottish by birth, he spent most of his childhood with his gra…
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "A Common Inference"
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) wrote fiction and nonfiction works including several collections of poetry and her most famous short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). Her poems address the i…
Robert Morgan's "Bellrope"
“The line through the hole in the dark…trembling/with its high connections.”
Robert Morgan (born 1944) is an American poet, short story writer, non-fiction author, biographer, and novelist. He studied…
Gwendolyn Brooks' "First fight. Then fiddle."
Today’s poem is about politics (but this, too, shall pass). Happy reading.
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Thomas Hardy's "The Shadow on the Stone"
Today’s poem is a reluctant reckoning with the present absence created by grief.
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Luci Shaw's "Judas, Peter"
Luci Shaw was born in 1928 in London, England, and has lived in Canada, Australia and the U.S.A. A graduate of Wheaton College, she became co-founder and later president of Harold Shaw Publishers, an…
Jonathan Swift's "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed"
In today’s poem, while everyone else is dressing up to become something terrible, the acerbic Jonathan Swift gives us a domestic horror story in reverse. Happy reading.
Anglo-Irish poet, satirist, ess…
Kenn Nesbitt's "Halloween Party"
Today’s poem is the stuff real nightmares are made of. Happy reading.
Nesbitt’s poetry for children is “irrepressible, unpredictable, and raucously popular,” in the words of former Children’s Poet Lau…
William Shakespeare's "Advice to Laertes" (from Hamlet I.3)
Today’s poem is some of the greatest ironic advice ever offered on the stage–do as Polonius says, not as he does, and you’ll be just fine. Happy reading.
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Bob Hicok's "O My Pa-Pa"
Bob Hicok was born in 1960 in Michigan and worked for many years in the automotive die industry. A published poet long before he earned his MFA, Hicok is the author of several collections of poems, i…
J. R. R. Tolkien's "When winter first begins to bite"
Today’s poem commemorates the Council of Elrond, testifies to the love (and fussiness) of hobbits, and even boasts a possible Shakespearean connection. Happy reading!
This is a public episode. If you…