… How Donald Hall changed Ox-Cart Man from the poem to the children’s book. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Hall is often described as a poet of rural life and New Hampshire’s natural world, or, better, as the plain-spoken chronicler of daily life and its blisses and heartbreaks. (He lived for decades, before and after the death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, in the 1803 New Hampshire farmhouse that had been Hall’s grandfather’s home.) Ox-Cart Man could be dismissed as patriarchal, capitalist, and nationalist in its celebration of a New England yeoman farmer—Hall is not usually thought of as a political or particularly progressive poet—but instead, this book assures me that all our work holds good, even if we can’t see the long-term effects from here.
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