“At lunch Robert [Bly] said, ‘Well, Mr. Hall, what do you think of having a poet for a son?’ As I feared, my father didn't know what to say; poetry was embarrassing, somehow. So I said, ‘Too bad your father doesn't have the same problem . . . ’”

“It is doubtful whether the individual soul is going to be allowed to survive at all. Now you get a Buddhist movement with everything except Confucius taken into it.”

“I think the most difficult thing for me is to be satisfactorily lucid, yet have enough implication in the writing to suit myself.”

“I couldn’t apply the word ‘intention’ positively to any of my poems. Or to any poem.”

The night refills itself.
Limestone drops to the sea
that varies blue all day

We’ve come to expect earthquakes, fires, hurricanes,
and tidal waves from our whitecoated brothers
whose laboratories shed radiation

Alexander, first over the wall,
collapsed battered by stones. Instantly
the Macedonian companions
gathered their shields over his body

I will strike down wooden houses; I will burn aluminum
clapboard skin; I will strike down garages
where crimson Toyotas sleep side by side; I will explode

“Beginning at five o’clock, just before dawn rises
in the rear-view mirror, I drive at eighty, alone,
all day through Texas. I am a pencil extending

In a bookshelf at the dark livingroom’s end
stood the ten volumes of Journeys Through Bookland
which my parents bought when I was born.

The avenue rises toward a city of white marble.
I am not meeting anyone. The capitol is empty.
I enter the dome of sleep.

Mime the loud wind in pain—
The worded room will yield
Your canny agony

Each of us waking to the window’s light
Has found the curtains changed, our pictures gone;
Our furniture has vanished in the night

Donald Hall, who died in June this year at the age of eighty-nine, compiled one final book of essays before his death.

Donald Hall, who died in June this year at the age of eighty-nine, was a prolific poet, essayist, and editor whose work has had an enormous impact on American letters. He was The Paris Review’s first poetry editor, and he served as the U.S. poet lau…

  Donald Hall served as The Paris Review’s first poetry editor from 1953 to 1961. His vast knowledge of contemporary poetry and demand for excellence helped set the Review’s poetry standards high from the beginning. In this undated letter, which i…

In “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” Pound has his poet protagonist say, “I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral … ” When poets die, there is a flurry of attention if not a boom: sections in magazines, reprinted poems, gatherings in honor. Because of renewed attention, the poet’s books may pick up in sales. Circumstances of death contribute to the quantity of response. Suicide is a shrewd career move.

Two of my teachers were Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters. From the 1930s into the 1960s, Mac Leish’s poetic reputation flourished, but by the time he died in 1982, in his ninetieth year, the literary stock market had devalued him. On the other hand, Yvor Winters’s poems were never popular. His eccentric and belligerent criticism drew attention away from his poems, which were sparse, spare and sometimes beautiful. 

Historically, poets have generally adopted one of two main “poses,” or manners of considering their own metier. One has been the prophet, or vates, the divine madman who scrawls out his gifts from the gods in a state of inspiration and frenzy. The vates corresponds to the popular conception of the poet as long-haired eccentric.

Donald Hall was The Paris Review’s first poetry editor. This notebook was found among his papers after his death in June.