Hall, Donald

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Donald Hall

Personal

Born September 20, 1928, in New Haven, CT; son of Donald Andrew (a businessman) and Lucy (Wells) Hall; married Kirby Thompson, September 13, 1952 (divorced 1969); married Jane Kenyon (a poet), April 17, 1972 (died April 22, 1995); children: (first marriage) Andrew, Philippa. Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1951; Oxford University, B. Litt., 1953; attended Stanford University, 1953-54.

Addresses

Home—Eagle Pond Farm, Danbury, NH 03230. Agent—Gerald McCauley Agency, Inc., Box 844, Katonah, NY 10536.

Career

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, junior fellow in Society of Fellows, 1954-57; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1957-75, began as assistant professor, became professor of English; full-time freelance writer, 1975—. Bennington College graduate Writing Seminars, poet-in-residence, 1993—. Broadcaster on British Broadcasting Corporation radio programs, 1959-80; host of Poets Talking (television interview series), 1974-75; has given poetry readings at colleges, universities, schools, and community centers.

Member

PEN, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Awards, Honors

Newdigate Prize, Oxford University, 1952, for poem "Exile"; Lamont Poetry Prize, Academy of American Poets, 1955, for Exiles and Marriages; Edna St. Vincent Millay Award, Poetry Society of America, 1956; Guggenheim fellowship, 1963-64, 1972-73; New York Times Notable Children's Books citation, 1979, and Caldecott Medal, 1980, both for Ox-Cart Man; Sarah Josepha Hale Award, 1983, for writings about New England; Horn Book Honor List, 1986, for The Oxford Book of Children's Verse in America; Lenore Marshall Prize, 1987, for The Happy Man; National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry, both 1989, both for The One Day; named poet Laureate of New Hampshire, 1984-89, 1995—; Associated Writing Programs Poetry Publication Award named in Hall's honor.

Writings

for children

Andrew the Lion Farmer, illustrated by Jane Miller, F. Watts (New York, NY), 1959, illustrated by Ann Reason, Methuen (London, England), 1961.

Riddle Rat, illustrated by Mort Gerberg, Warne (London, England), 1977.

Ox-Cart Man, illustrated by Barbara Cooney, Viking (New York, NY), 1979.

The Man Who Lived Alone, illustrated by Mary Azarian, Godine (New York, NY), 1984.

(Editor) The Oxford Book of Children's Verse in America, Oxford University Press, 1985.

The Farm Summer 1942, illustrated by Barry Moser, Dial (New York, NY), 1994.

I Am the Dog, I Am the Cat, illustrated by Barry Moser, Dial (New York, NY) l, 1994.

Lucy's Christmas, illustrated by Michael McCurdy, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1994.

Lucy's Summer, illustrated by Michael McCurdy, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1995.

When Willard Met Babe Ruth, illustrated by Barry Moser, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1996.

Old Home Day, illustrated by Emily Arnold McCully, Harcourt Brace, (New York, NY) 1996.

The Milkman's Boy, illustrated by Greg Shed, Walker (New York, NY), 1997.

poetry

Fantasy Poets No. 4, Fantasy Press, 1952.

Exile, Fantasy Press, 1952.

To the Loud Wind and Other Poems, Pegasus, 1955.

Exiles and Marriages, Viking (New York, NY), 1955.

The Dark Houses, Viking (New York, NY), 1958.

A Roof of Tiger Lilies, Viking (New York, NY), 1964.

The Alligator Bride: Poems, New and Selected, Harper (New York, NY), 1969.

The Yellow Room: Love Poems, Harper (New York, NY), 1971.

The Gentleman's Alphabet Book (limericks), illustrated by Harvey Kornberg, Dutton (New York, NY), 1972.

The Town of Hill, Godine (New York, NY), 1975.

A Blue Wing Tilts at the Edge of the Sea: Selected Poems, 1964-1974, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1975.

Kicking the Leaves, Harper (New York, NY), 1978.

The Toy Bone, BOA Editions, 1979.

Brief Lives: Seven Epigrams, William B. Ewart, 1983.

The Twelve Seasons, Deerfield Press, 1983.

Great Day in the Cow's House, illustrated with photographs by T. S. Bronson, Ives Street Press, 1984.

The Happy Man, Random House (New York, NY), 1986.

The One Day, Ticknor & Fields, 1988.

Old and New Poems, Ticknor & Fields, 1990.

The Museum of Clear Ideas, Ticknor & Fields, 1993.

The Old Life, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1996.

Without, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1998.

The Purpose of a Chair, Brooding Heron Press (Waldron Island, WA), 2000.

The Painted Bed, Houghton (Boston, MA), 2002.

Contributor of poetry to numerous periodicals, including the New Yorker, New Republic, New Criterion, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Georgia Review, Ohio Review, Gettysburg Review, Nation, and Atlantic Monthly.

prose

String Too Short to Be Saved: Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm (autobiography), illustrated by Mimi Korach, Viking (New York, NY), 1961, expanded edition, Godine (New York, NY), 1979.

Henry Moore: The Life and Work of a Great Sculptor, Harper (New York, NY), 1966.

As the Eye Moves: A Sculpture by Henry Moore, illustrated with photographs by David Finn, Abrams (New York, NY), 1970.

Marianne Moore: The Cage and the Animal, Pegasus, 1970.

The Pleasures of Poetry, Harper (New York, NY), 1971.

Writing Well, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1974, 9th edition (with Sven Birkerts), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1997.

(With others) Playing Around: The Million-Dollar Infield Goes to Florida, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1974.

(With Dock Ellis) Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, Coward (New York, NY), 1976.

Goatfoot Milktongue Twinbird: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry, 1970-76, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1978.

Remembering Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions—Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Harper (New York, NY), 1978, revised edition published as Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, Ticknor & Fields, 1992.

To Keep Moving: Essays, 1959-1969, Hobart & William Smith Colleges Press, 1980.

To Read Literature, Holt (New York, NY), 1980.

The Weather for Poetry: Essays, Reviews, and Notes on Poetry, 1977-1981, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1982.

Fathers Playing Catch with Sons: Essays on Sport (Mostly Baseball), North Point Press, 1985.

Seasons at Eagle Pond, illustrated by Thomas W. Nason, Ticknor & Fields, 1987.

Poetry and Ambition, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1988.

Here at Eagle Pond, illustrated by Thomas W. Nason, Ticknor & Fields, 1990.

Life Work, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1993.

Death to the Death of Poetry: Essays, Reviews, Notes, Interviews, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1994.

Principle Products of Portugal: Prose Pieces, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1995.

Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 2003.

Willow Temple: New and Selected Stories, Houghton (Boston, MA), 2003.

Contributor of short stories and articles to numerous periodicals, including the New Yorker, Esquire, Atlantic, Playboy, Transatlantic Review, and American Scholar.

plays

An Evening's Frost, first produced in Ann Arbor, MI; produced Off-Broadway, 1965.

Bread and Roses, produced in Ann Arbor, MI, 1975.

Ragged Mountain Elegies (produced in Peterborough, NH, 1983), revised version published as The Bone Ring (produced in New York, NY, 1986), Story Line, 1987.

editor

The Harvard Advocate Anthology, Twayne (New York, NY), 1950.

(With Robert Pack and Louis Simpson) The New Poets of England and America, Meridian Books, 1957.

Whittier, Dell (New York, NY), 1961.

Contemporary American Poetry, Penguin (London England), 1962, Penguin (Baltimore, MD), 1963.

(With Robert Pack) New Poets of England and America: Second Selection, Meridian Books, 1962.

A Poetry Sampler, F. Watts (New York, NY), 1962.

(With Stephen Spender) The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry, Hawthorn, 1963.

(With Warren Taylor) Poetry in English, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1963.

The Faber Book of Modern Verse, revised edition, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1965.

A Choice of Whitman's Verse, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1968.

Man and Boy, F. Watts (New York, NY), 1968.

The Modern Stylists: Writers on the Art of Writing, Free Press (New York, NY), 1968.

American Poetry: An Introductory Anthology, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1969.

(With D. L. Emblem) A Writer's Reader, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1969, 9th edition, Longman (New York, NY), 2002.

The Pleasures of Poetry, Harper (New York, NY), 1971.

The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1981.

To Read Literature: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Holt (New York, NY), 1981, 3rd edition, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1992.

Claims for Poetry, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1982.

To Read Poetry, Holt (New York, NY), 1982, revised edition published as To Read a Poem, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1992.

The Contemporary Essay, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1984, 3rd edition, 1995.

The Oxford Book of Children's Verse in America, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1985.

To Read Fiction, Holt (New York, NY), 1987.

(With Pat Corrington Wykes) Anecdotes of Modern Art: From Rousseau to Warhol, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1990.

Peter Davison, One of the Dangerous Trades: Essays on the Work and Workings of Poetry, 1963-1990, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1991.

Andrew Marvell, The Essential Marvell, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1991.

Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Essential Robinson, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1993.

Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children's Poems, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

Former poetry editor, Paris Review. Former member of editorial board, Wesleyan University Press poetry series; editor, University of Michigan "Poets on Poetry" series.

Sidelights

Considered one of the major American poets of his generation, Donald Hall explores a longing for the more bucolic past and his verse reflects his abiding reverence for nature. Although Hall gained an early success with his 1955 poetry collection Exiles and Marriages, his mature recent poetry has generally been regarded as the best of his career. Often compared favorably with such writers as James Dickey, Robert Bly, and James Wright, Hall uses simple, direct language to evoke surrealistic imagery. In addition to his poetry, Hall has build a respected body of prose work that includes essays, short fiction, plays, and a number of children's books. Hall, who lives on the New Hampshire farm he visited in summers as a boy, is also noted for the anthologies he has edited and is a popular teacher, speaker, and reader of his own poems.

A New England Childhood

Born in 1928, Hall grew up in Hamden, Connecticut, a child of the Great Depression of the 1930s, though not greatly affected by it. Hall spent his boyhood in Connecticut and New Hampshire. The Hall household was marked by a volatile father and a mother who was "steadier, maybe with more access to depths because there was less continual surface," as Hall explained in an essay for Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (CAAS). "To her I owe my fires, to my father my tears. I owe them both for their reading." In "Finally Only the Art of Love," an essay published in the New York Times Book Review, Hall spoke of the childhood influences on his writing career and two of the houses he remembered living in as a boy. "When I was in my snooty teens I would have denied it," he wrote, "but these houses were bookish." The reading matter consisted of Book-of-the-Month-Club "masterpieces," Reader's Digest and Collier's. "I felt superior," the poet confessed, realizing only later his good fortune in living with "people who continually gazed at print" and having a mother who read poems to him. Hall remembers too his discovery of the poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe: "I read Poe and my life changed," he remarked in CAAS. Another strong influence in Hall's early years was his maternal great-grandfather's farm in New Hampshire, where he spent many summers. The pull of nature became a compulsion in him so strong that decades later he bought that same farm and settled there as a full-time writer and poet.

Hall attended Philips Exeter Academy and despite early frustrations had his first poem published at age sixteen. He was a participant at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writer's Conference that same year. From Exeter, Hall went to Harvard University, where he attended class alongside other poets-intraining, among them Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery; he also studied for a year with Archibald MacLeish. In his time at Oxford University, Hall became one of the few Americans to win the coveted Newdigate contest for his poem "Exile."

Returning to the United States, Hall spent three years at Harvard and there assembled Exiles and Marriages, a collection crafted in a tightly structured style on which Hall imposes rigid rhyme and meter. In 1957 he took a position as assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he remained until 1975. During those years he wrote volumes of poetry and essays, and edited several important anthologies. Hall's conservative posture informed the influential anthology he edited with Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, The New Poets of England and America. This book, with an introduction by Robert Frost, exhibited the academic taste then in vogue and stood in rigid opposition to contemporary innovative work such as that gathered three years later in Donald Allen's anthology The New American Poetry. These two books were widely seen as defining an unbridgeable chasm in American poetry: in fact, no poet appeared in both. Hall eventually modified his view, and his later anthology, Contemporary American Poetry, published in 1962, included a number of poets, such as John Ashbery, who would have been uncomfortable in the earlier volume. Nonetheless, Hall has continued to be seen as a spokesman for the more conventional side of American poetry.

During his teaching career at the University of Michigan, Hall had always contemplated returning to the rural paradise that he had found as a youth in New Hampshire. Finally he was in a position to make this a reality, and when his grandmother, who owned Eagle Pond Farm, passed away, he bought the farm, left teaching, and moved there with his second wife, poet Jane Kenyon. With one child in college at the time and another having not yet started, the move to New Hampshire was a risky one. Giving up the relative security of a tenured position at Michigan was a difficult decision, "but I did not hesitate, I did not doubt," Hall recalled in CAAS. "I panicked but I did not doubt." The collections Kicking the Leaves and The Happy Man reflect Hall's happiness at his return to the family farm, a place rich with memories and links to his past. Many of the poems explore and celebrate the continuity between generations, as the narrative voice in his poetry often reminisces about the past and anticipates the future.

Most of Hall's major poetry was written after his return to New Hampshire. Many of these poems evoke the durable, seemingly immutable character of this region as seen through a deeply meditative or reflective sensibility. The books of this period include Kicking the Leaves (1978), The Happy Man (1986), The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993), and The Old Life (1996). The 1988 collection The One Day, a series of linked poems in blank verse, earned Hall the presitigious National Book Critics Circle Award.

Some of Hall's feelings about his move to New Hampshire were expressed in Kicking the Leaves, which Brent Spencer described in Poet and Critic as "mostly poems about memory, yet not mere reminiscence. The effort in these poems is to look for that part of the past that lives on into the present. They are, for the most part, poems about the gifts the past brings to us, the gifts of the dead." A prose relative of the poetry collection, String Too Short to Be Saved, contains stories or reminiscences about Hall's boyhood summers on the farm. "Ultimately the prose book expresses a moral imperative that goes beyond mere nostalgia and personal need," Barry Wallenstein elaborated in American Book Review. "The author realizes the insight that 'to be without history is like being forgotten.'" "The

stories show both of the main characteristics of Hall's poetry—the attention to language and to detail," Spencer wrote. "And they show a real storyteller at work, something we get a taste of in Kicking the Leaves. Each book throws light on the other, both coming as they do from the same source."

The Happy Man, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize, also centers on Hall's life on the family farm. As William Logan explained in the New York Times Book Review, the poems in this collection continue the "New Hampshire pastoral" of Kicking the Leaves, "but in a landscape of reversion and collapse…. The tone of these poems veers wildly between mania and depression." Alicia Ostriker also acknowledged this quality. "Where Kicking the Leaves was elegiac," she wrote in the Nation, "this book begins to grapple with monsters: fear, guilt, despair." Ostriker praised the collection for its depiction of rural New England life, exclaiming that Hall "paints scenes with the reverent earthliness of a Dutch master, getting all the textures right." Again providing a prose counterpart to a book of poems is the slim collection of essays titled Seasons at Eagle Pond. In this book Hall evoked his native New England "as eloquently as any living writer," in the opinion of Frank Levering in the Washington Post Book World, who praised the author for taking on picture-postcard characteristics of rural New England and making them fresh for the reader.

An Award-Winning Collection

Hall's 1988 book of poetry, The One Day, was published on his sixtieth birthday and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Composed of 110 ten-line stanzas divided into three parts, The One Day is an ambitious work in which Hall speaks in several narrative voices about mid-life crisis. Reviewing the book for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Liam Rector claimed that "Hall has long kept his eye and ear upon what is old, what is historical, what seems behind us yet is still living with us, and with The One Day he moves out into a different terrain from his recent mature books, Kicking the Leaves and The Happy Man."

In an American Poetry Review interview with Rector, Hall explained that The One Day "began with an onslaught of language back in 1971. Over a period of weeks I kept receiving messages. I filled page after page of notebooks…. It was inchoate, sloppy, but full of material: verbal, imaginative, recollected."

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After approaching this material in several different ways over a period of seventeen years, Hall went on, he developed the 110 ten-line stanzas and worked with them for about four more years before he thought of structuring the long narrative poem into three parts.

The One Day, Daniel Mark Epstein wrote in America, is "Donald Hall's poem of the mid-life crisis, a painful time for men and women alike." Epstein observed that Hall "uses mid-life as a metaphor that works on several levels—personal, historical and mythic." Both a male and a female voice speak in The One Day, but they appear to be aspects of one voice—perhaps the poet's persona, as Stephen Sandy suggests in the Boston Review—that works through despair, rage, and cynicism before settling into a calm that embodies acceptance of inevitable death. In the Washington Post Book World, David Lehman praised the book as "loud, sweeping, multitudinous, an act of the imperial imagination" and declared that "high on Hall's thematic agenda are age and aging, rage and raging against the dying of the light, but his powerful rhetorical gestures and dazzling juxtapositions communicate a pleasure even beyond the skillful treatment of such themes." Ploughshares contributor Liam Rector dubbed the book to be "an eloquent consummation of Modernism."

Poems Inspired by Universal Joys, Personal Sorrows

Two years after the success of The One Day, Hall's Old and New Poems was published. Richard Tillinghast, writing in the New York Times Book Review, labeled the book a "magnificent collection" and "Praise for Death," the closing poem, "perhaps the finest sustained evocation of death in American poetry." Reviewing the book in the Times Literary Supplement, Dick Davis declared that "few writers could have taken such apparently slight anecdotes of country life and made them, so unobtrusively but surely, into such profoundly authoritative icons of human experience."

The Museum of Clear Ideas was published in 1993 and includes Hall's poem "Baseball," his ode to the game. The poem is based on the nine innings of a baseball game: marked by nine stanzas, nine syllables per line, and so on. John Skott of Time noted of Hall: "He is besotted by baseball and, like all the other writers who crowd the box seats, assumes dreamily that everyone will accept this." The collection also includes poetry on such topics as love, sex, family, aging, and poetry. As Susanne Keen commented in Commonweal, "Hall does not eschew the ordinary; he inhabits it. Books and poems and language belong in this poet's everyday world, so we find poems about old affairs or old friends cheek by jowl with his criticism of contemporary poetry." High praise came from Vernon Shetley of the Yale Review: "Hall's latest book should encourage us all: live long enough, work hard and sincerely, and eventually the muse will pay you back by giving you poems as wonderful as these."

Tragically for Hall, the life he shared with Kenyon, which was chronicled by journalist Bill Moyers in the 1993 film A Life Together, was not to last. While his works had focused on baseball, the joys of community, and family, they now took on a more somber tone, as he and Kenyon fought against the leukemia that would ultimately take her life in 1995 at age forty-seven. Written following Kenyon's death, Without reflects on the first changes the absence of his wife brought to the poet's life. The Painted Bed finds Hall in another phase of the grieving process, the poems included showcasing the poet's "distinctive musical mark" and "exhibiting the terrible suffering of the bereaved with dignity and beauty," according to Book contributor Stephen Whited.

Speaking of Hall's overall work as a poet, an essayist for Contemporary Poets explained: "In a country like the United States that eschews aging and casts an amnesiac's eye on its past and traditions, in a country that increasingly focuses on the right now and the self at the expense of historical perspective and compassion for neighbors, Hall's poetry, and especially his verse since 1978, reminds us of what is most enduring in our culture…. A poet is ulti mately judged on his ability to tell the true stories of his tribe. In late middle age Hall transcended the pack of popular academic plodders all around him to become a solitary singer whose remarkable vision has included us all."

In addition to his accomplishments as a poet, Hall is respected as an academic who, through writing, teaching, and lecturing, has made significant contributions to the study and craft of writing. As Rector explained, Hall "has lived deeply within the New England ethos of plain living and high thinking, and he has done so with a sense of humor and eros." In Remembering Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions, a 1978 work that was expanded as Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets and More Poets, Hall recounts his relationship with fellow poets such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, and Robert Frost. His books on the craft of writing include Writing Well—in its ninth edition by 1998—and Death to the Death of Poetry. Life Work is Hall's memoir of the writing life and his tenure at Eagle Pond Farm, while his children's book Ox-Cart Man is one among several works that have established him in the field of children's literature. A fable on the cyclical nature of life, Ox-Cart Man expresses for readers "the sense that work defines us all, connects us with our world, and we are all rewarded … in measure of our effort," according to Kristi L. Thomas in School Library Journal.

If you enjoy the works of Donald Hall

If you enjoy the works of Donald Hall, you may also want to check out the following books:

Robert Frost, A Witness Tree, 1942.

Richard Wilbur, Things of This World: Poems, 1956.

Sharon Olds, The Father: Poems, 1992.

Hall continues to live and work on his New Hampshire farm, a site which serves as both his abode and an inspiration for much of his work. Following his wife's tragic death in the spring of 1995, Hall appeared at several tributes to Jane Kenyon's work, and composed an afterword to a posthumous collection of her poetry, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems. His work, much of which continues to be inspired by memories of Kenyon and their life together, frequently appears in such periodicals as Poetry, Ploughshares, and Kenyon Review.

Biographical and Critical Sources

books

Children's Books and Their Creators, edited by Anita Silvey, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1995.

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Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 7, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1988, pp. 55-67.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 13, 1980, Volume 37, 1986, Volume 59, 1989.

Contemporary Poets, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 7th edition, 2001.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1980.

Hall, Donald, Riddle Rat, Warne (London, England), 1977.

Hall, Donald, The Man Who Lived Alone, Godine (New York, NY), 1984.

Hall, Donald, I Am the Dog, I Am the Cat, Dial (New York, NY), 1994.

Rector, Liam, editor, The Day I Was Older: Collected Writings on the Poetry of Donald Hall, Story Line Press, 1989.

periodicals

America, June 17-24, 1989, Daniel Mark Epstein, review of The One Day.

American Book Review, March-April, 1981, Barry Wallenstein, review of String Too Short to Be Saved.

American Poetry Review, January-February, 1989, Liam Rector, interview with Hall.

Book, May-June, 2002, Stephen Whited, review of The Painted Bed, p. 85.

Booklist, July 15, 1977, p. 1728; June 1, 1994, p. 1816; August, 1994, p. 2051; September 15, 1994, p. 132; March 15, 1996, Bill Ott, review of When Willard Met Babe Ruth, p. 1262; September 1, 1996, p. 724; March 15, 2000, Gillian Engberg, review of The Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children's Poems, p. 1380; March 1, 2002, Ray Olson, review of The Painted Bed, p. 1079; April 15, 2003, Ellen Loughran, review of Willow Temple: New and Selected Stories, p. 1448.

Boston Globe Magazine, May 26, 1985.

Boston Review, October, 1988, Stephen Sandy, review of The One Day.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, February, 1980, Zena Sutherland, review of Ox-Cart Man, p. 110; March, 1985, pp. 126-27; July, 1994, Deborah Stevenson, review of The Farm Summer 1942, p. 358; October, 1994, Roger Sutton, review of Lucy's Summer, pp. 48-49; December, 1994, Roger Sutton, review of I Am the Dog, I Am the Cat, p. 129; June, 1996, p. 336; October, 1996, p. 61.

Christian Science Monitor, October 2, 1958.

Commonweal, September 24, 1993, Susanne Keen, review of The Museum of Clear Ideas, p. 21; December 2, 1994, p. 29.

Emergency Librarian, March, 1995, p. 44; January, 1996, p. 55.

Encounter, March, 1965.

Horn Book, February, 1982, Mary M. Burns, review of Ox-Cart Man, pp. 44-45; July-August, 1994, Nancy Vasilakis, review of The Farm Summer 1942, p. 441; September-October, 1994, Ann A. Flowers, review of I Am the Dog, I Am the Cat, p. 577; November-December, 1994, Elizabeth S. Watson, review of Lucy's Christmas, p. 711; May, 1995, pp. 324-325; November, 1996, pp. 724-725.

Iowa Review, winter, 1971.

Junior Bookshelf, December, 1980, review of Ox-Cart Man, pp. 283-284.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 1994, review of IAmthe Dog, I Am the Cat, p. 1129; October 15, 1994, review of Lucy's Christmas, pp. 1420-1421; November 1, 1984, review of The Man Who Lived Alone, p. 88; March 1, 1996, review of When Willard Met Babe Ruth, pp. 374-375; July 15, 1996, review of Old Home Day, p. 1048; July 15, 1997, p. 1111; March 15, 2003, review of Willow Temple, p. 416.

Library Journal, April 15, 2003, review of Willow Temple, p. 128; December, 2003, review of Breakfast Served Any Time All Day, p. 118.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 5, 1989, Liam Rector, review of The One Day; April 30, 1995, p. 6; August 4, 1996, p. 11.

Nation, August 30, 1986, Alicia Ostriker, review of The Happy Man.

New Republic, February 14, 1994.

New Statesman, November 27, 1964.

New Yorker, June 28, 1993; October 11, 1993.

New York Review of Books, March 24, 1994.

New York Times Book Review, January 13, 1985, Thomas Powers, review of The Man Who Lived Alone, p. 26; January 18, 1987, William Logan, review of The Happy Man; February 24, 1991, Richard Tillinghast, review of Old and New Poems; October 3, 1993; April 30, 1995, p. 22.

Ploughshares, fall, 2001, Liam Rector, "About Donald Hall," p. 270.

Poet and Critic, Volume 12, number 3, 1980, Brent Spencer, review of Kicking the Leaves.

Poetry, May, 1971; December, 2003, review of Breakfast Served Any Time All Day, p. 177.

Publishers Weekly, June 13, 1977, review of Riddle Rat, p. 108; April 11, 1994, review of The Farm Summer 1942, p. 65; April 10, 1995, review of Lucy's Summer, p. 62; August 12, 1996, review of Old Home Day, p. 82; July 14, 1997, review of The Milkman's Boy, p. 83; February 25, 2002, review of The Painted Bed, p. 56; March 31, 2003, review of Willow Temple, p. 39.

Quill and Quire, May, 1995, review of Lucy's Summer, p. 51.

School Library Journal, September, 1977, p. 108; October, 1979, Kristi L. Thomas, review of Ox-Cart Man, p. 140; February, 1985, Anna Biagioni Hart, review of The Man Who Lived Alone, p. 64; September, 1994, p. 101; May, 1996, p. 113; October, 1996, p. 96; January, 2000, Margaret Bush, review of The Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children's Poems, p. 121.

Sewanee Review, summer, 1994; winter, 2000, review of Without, p. 6.

Tennessee Poetry Journal (special Donald Hall issue), winter, 1971.

Time, December 5, 1955; March 22, 1993, p. 70, John Skott, review of The Museum of Clear Ideas.

Times Literary Supplement, November 1, 1991, Dick Davis, review of Old and New Poems.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1965; spring, 1970.

Washington Post Book World, December 17, 1987, Frank Levering, review of Seasons at Eagle Pond; August 28, 1988, David Lehman, review of The One Day; September 12, 1993, p. 4; January 22, 1995, p. 12.

World Literature Today, summer, 1995, p. 593.

Yale Review, October, 1993, Vernon Shetley, review of The Museum of Clear Ideas, p. 151.