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Donald Hall
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"Donald Hall's collection of 'Essays on poetry new and selected' is a volume I will be returning to many times in the future. Engrossing, passionate, humorous and wonderfully insightful, these engaging studies will delight those who enjoy poetry, or would like to. . . . The best selections---and there is hardly a second-best page in the entire volume---occur when Hall reflects upon the nature of poetry itself. The theme that he returns to again and again is the unique relationship between form and content that makes a particular poem a poem, and he always approaches his
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Donald Hall is the fourteenth poet laureate of the United States and the author of more than two dozen books of poems and prose, including White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946–2006. His work has garnered many honors, among them the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry for The One Day; the Lenore Marshall Award for The Happy Man; the Robert Frost Silver Medal from the Poetry Society of America for Old and New Poems; and the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in recognition of his lifetime accomplishments. His poetry collection Without, which was written for Jane Kenyon during and after her illness, received the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Hall continues to inhabit the New Hampshire farmhouse where he and Jane Kenyon lived together.
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Donald Hall (1928- ) began writing as an adolescent, even attending the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at the age of 16. He attended both Harvard (B.A. 1951) and Oxford (B. Litt. 1953) before he became a professor at the University of Michigan. It was there at the University of Michigan he met his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon (1947-1995). In 1957 Hall quit his job and moved back to New Hampshire, to the farm that was settled by Hall's great-grandfather in 1865.
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Considered one of the major American poets of his generation, Donald Hall's works explore a longing for the more bucolic past and reflect the poet's abiding reverence for nature. Although Hall gained an early success with his 1955 poetry collection Exiles and Marriages, his more recent poetry has generally been regarded as the best of his career. Often compared favorably with such writers as James Dickey, Robert Bly, and James Wright, Hall uses simple, direct language to evoke surrealistic imagery. In addition to his poetry, Hall has built a respected body of prose work that includes essays, short fiction, plays, and children's books. Hall, who lives on the New Hampshire farm he visited in summers as a boy, is ... noted for the anthologies he has edited and is a popular teacher, speaker, and reader of his own poems.
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Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. He graduated from Harvard University in 1951, studied at Oxford, and taught English at the University of Michigan from 1957 until 1975. Since then he has been a free-lance writer of poetry, criticism, sports journalism, biography, college textbooks, essays about the country, and plays. Hall’s recent books include The Ideal Bakery, a collection of short stories (North Point Press, 1987), and The One Day: A Poem in Three Parts, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 1989 (Ticknor & Fields, 1988). He has edited Contemporary American Poetry (Penguin, 1972) and The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes (Oxford, 1981). Twice awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, he received the Lenore Marshall/National Poetry Prize for The Happy Man (Random House, 1986).
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Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928, the only son of a businessman. He went to prep school at Phillips Exeter and began writing poems and short stories as a teenager. When he was just 16, he attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where he met Robert Frost, and that year he published his first poem. He earned a B.A. at Harvard, a B.Litt. at Oxford, studied with Yvor Winters as a Creative Writing Fellow at Stanford, then returned to spend three years at Harvard in the Society of Fellows.
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Donald Hall