Winter Poems from Eagle Pond

About Donald Hall

Long considered the Dean of American Poetry Donald Hall (1929-2018) was Poet Laureate of the United States 2006-2007. He was the prolific author of numerous books of poetry criticism and literary biography as well as books for children. Halls 1957 anthology The New Poets of England and America established the canon of the best of the Academic Poets including Anthony Hecht John Hollander Donald Justice May Swenson and Richard Wilbur by maintaining allegiance to the traditional well-made poem as championed by T. S. Eliot and John Crowe Ransom. He was married to the American poet Jane Kenyon and they lived on the Hall family farm in rural New Hampshire in a farmhouse built in 1803 beside Eagle Pond. Hall and Kenyon were interviewed at the house by Bill Moyers in an Emmy Award-winning PBS documentary Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon: A Life Together broadcast in 1993. In his 1983 essay Poetry and Ambition Hall wrote I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.Barry Moser (1940-) is an artista printmaker and illustrator of many literary works of literature. He is also the owner of Pennyroyal Press. He provided illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass which received the 1982 American Book Award for design and illustration in 1982. He has illustrated nearly 200 other works as well including The Bible and Moby-Dick. His works have been displayed in such places as the British Museum the Metropolitan Museum Harvard and the Library of Congress.