Appreciation …

… REMEMBRANCE: Donald Hall, a New England Poet of the First Order — The National Book Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Hall was 14 when he decided to become a poet. He met Robert Frost at 16 and published his first poetry collection, Exiles and Marriages, at 26. Although he came to dislike the book, it nearly won the Pulitzer Prize. One judge called it “the most provocative book of poetry published in 1955.” The other wrote: “If he never composed another poem, another book, his name would stand in the roster of American poets.” Only the winner, Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, beat out Exiles and Marriages.