Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928 and spent his summers at Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire—a place that would inspire him throughout his life. He was a remarkable talent: he attended Phillips Exeter Academy, then Harvard, and later Oxford on a fellowship. By his mid-twenties, he had already secured a significant editorial role in American literature, becoming the first poetry editor of *The Paris Review* in 1953, a position he held for nearly ten years. In this capacity, he created the magazine's renowned "Art of Poetry" interview series, speaking candidly with notable figures like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, asking them straightforwardly how they crafted their work.
His early poetry was formally structured, earning praise and awards. However, a significant change occurred in 1975 when he left a tenured position at the University of Michigan and moved with his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, to Eagle Pond Farm full-time. This choice—to prioritize writing over stability—transformed everything. The farm, the changing seasons, the physical demands of rural life, and the long winters in New Hampshire contributed to a body of work that became increasingly open, deeply rooted, and more attuned to grief.
“When Kenyon was diagnosed with leukemia in 1994 and passed away the following year, Hall was heartbroken.”
The poems he wrote in response—gathered in *Without* (1998)—are some of the most honest and raw elegies in modern American poetry. He didn't seek comfort or abstract explanations; he simply faced the reality of what had occurred.
Hall later received the National Medal of Arts, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2007. He authored over fifty books, spanning poetry, memoir, children's literature, biography, and essays—including the cherished children's book *Ox-Cart Man*, which won the Caldecott Medal in 1980. He continued to write and engage in interviews well into his eighties, maintaining his curiosity and insight into the craft until his death in 2018 at the age of eighty-nine.
