Essay

A Life-Long Devotion Pays Off

Donald Hall is appointed 14th poet laureate of the United States.

BY The Editors

Originally Published: June 14, 2006

Congratulations to Donald Hall who was named by the librarian of Congress to succeed Ted Kooser as the next poet laureate of the United States.

Few contemporary American writers have devoted themselves more fully to the art of poetry than Donald Hall (1928—). Born in New Haven, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard and Oxford, he retired from teaching in 1975 and returned to his family’s farm in New Hampshire, determined to make his living as a freelance man of letters. Among his many works of criticism and poetry are Their Ancient Glittering Eyes (1992), a book dedicated to the lives of poets, and Without (1998), a series of elegies for his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995.

Poems
Eating the Pig
Ox Cart Man
Poem with One Fact
Stump
The Black-Faced Sheep
The Seventh Inning
The Ship Pounding
The Wreckage

Articles from Poetry
Claims on the Poet
The Third Thing

Donald Hall reads and explains his poems
Affirmation
Christmas Eve in Whitneyville
Her Garden
The Man in the Dead Machine
White Apples

Audio from White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 (Houghton Mifflin)
Buy this Book
The Ship Pounding
Without
To a Waterfowl
Retriever
Letter with no Address
Woolworth's

PoetryFoundation.org Podcasts featuring Donald Hall
Silent Fathers, Noisy Sons: Poems for Father's Day (June 13)
Donald Hall (April 4)

The editorial staff of the Poetry Foundation. See the Poetry Foundation staff list and editorial team masthead.

Read Full Biography