Donald Hall

Donald Hall (born September 20, 1928, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.—died June 23, 2018, Wilmot, New Hampshire) was an American poet, essayist, and critic, whose poetic style moved from studied formalism to greater emphasis on personal expression.

Hall received bachelor’s degrees in literature from both Harvard (1951) and Oxford (1953) universities and at the latter received the Newdigate Prize in 1952 for his poem Exile. He was a junior fellow at Harvard from 1954 to 1957 and then taught at the University of Michigan until 1975, when he moved to a farm in New Hampshire once owned by his grandparents. There he devoted himself to writing. Hall was poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress from 2006 to 2007.

The poems collected in Exiles and Marriages (1955) exhibit the influence of Hall’s academic training: their style and structure are rigorously formal. In The Dark Houses (1958) he shows a richer emotional range, presaging the intuitive, anecdotal works for which he has become best known—e.g., A Roof of Tiger Lilies (1964) and The Alligator Bride (1968). The book-length The One Day: A Poem in Three Parts (1988), considered his masterpiece, is an intricate meditation on middle age. White Apples and the Taste of Stone (2006) is a collection of poetry from across his career.

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Hall’s numerous prose works ranged widely, from Marianne Moore: The Cage and the Animal (1970) to a biography of the American sculptor Henry Moore. He edited anthologies of verse and of prose and wrote books for children. He also wrote works on baseball, including Fathers Playing Catch with Sons (1985).

The death in 1995 of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, powerfully influenced his later work: the poetry collections Without (1998) and The Painted Bed (2002) explore loss and grieving, and The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon (2005) is a memoir.