Today’s selection may not be traditionally recognized as a holiday poem, but it interprets the Christmas mystery as well or better than many poems written for the season. Happy reading!

In today’s poems-“The Inn at the End of the World” and “The House of Christmas”–Chesterton imagines Christmas as a cosmic waystation for weary pilgrims. Happy reading.

Don’t be fooled by the lack of Dickensian drama: melancholy, materialism, regret, a graveyard–today’s poem is A Christmas Carol for the modern man.

Today’s selection is an ideal poem for Advent–a bittersweet shape poem that expresses the “hopes and fears of all the years.”

Poet and critic John Hollander wrote of Merrill that he “was continually reengaging those Proustian themes of the retrieval of lost childhood, the operations of involuntary memory and of an imaginative memory even more mysterious.”

Are home movies the grecian urns of the twentieth century? Today’s poem says, “sort of.”

Poet, editor, essayist, playwright, and lyricist Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She grew up in Michigan and Maryland, and earned degrees from Harvard and Cambridge University. A former editor at the Atlantic Monthly, poetry editor at the New Republic, and co-editor of the fourth and fifth editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, Salter’s thorough understanding of poetic tradition is clearly evident in her work. Salter is the author of many books of poetry, including A Kiss in Space (1999), Open Shutters (2003), A Phone Call to the Future (2008), Nothing by Design (2013), and The Surveyors (2017). Her second book, Unfinished Painting (1989) was a Lamont Selection for the most distinguished second volume of poetry published that year, Sunday Skaters (1994) was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Open Shutters was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Salter has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and taught for many years at Mount Holyoke College. She is currently the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Today’s poem is, in may ways, the ode of odes. It has inspired volumes upon volumes of poetry and scholarship alike. And yet, it remains nothing more and nothing less than a humble and impassioned conversation with a work of beauty. Happy reading.

Today’s poem for St. Lucy’s day is a remembrance of a light “too bright for our infirm delight” dawning in the deepest darkness of the year.

The poem is collected in Waiting on the Word: a poem a day for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. You can also hear a vastly superior reading of the poem by the author himself.

Today’s poem–known to many as the musical setting, “In the Bleak Midwinter”–contemplates unprecedented act of loves in the darkest days of the year. Happy reading.

Ezra Pound had his own complicated relationship with fame, exercising a profound influence upon 20th-century literature but being tried for treason in the U.S. after broadcasting propaganda for the fascists during WWII. Today’s poem is a guarded reflection on the never-ending quest. Happy reading.

Today is the birthday of Emily Dickinson, and to mark the occasion we have selected a poem that manages to sum up the entire paradox of the human condition in just two lines. Happy reading.

Mark Strand was born on Canada’s Prince Edward Island on April 11, 1934. He received a BA from Antioch College in Ohio in 1957 and attended Yale University, where he was awarded the Cook Prize and the Bergin Prize. After receiving his BFA degree in 1959, Strand spent a year studying at the University of Florence on a Fulbright fellowship. In 1962 he received his MA from the University of Iowa.

Strand was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Almost Invisible (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Man and Camel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Blizzard of One (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Dark Harbor (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); The Continuous Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Selected Poems (Atheneum, 1980); The Story of Our Lives(Atheneum, 1973); and Reasons for Moving (Atheneum, 1968).

Strand also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century (W. W. Norton, 2005); The Golden Ecco Anthology (Ecco, 1994); The Best American Poetry 1991; and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, co-edited with Charles Simic (HarperCollins, 1976).

Strand’s honors included the Bollingen Prize, a Rockefeller Foundation award, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 2004 Wallace Stevens Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1979, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from the Academy of American Poets, as well as fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.

Strand served as poet laureate of the United States from 1990 to 1991 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1995 to 2000. He taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City.

Mark Strand died at eighty years old on November 29, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York.

-bio via Academy of American Poets