Few contemporary American writers have devoted themselves more fully to the art of poetry than Donald Hall (1928—). Born in New Haven, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard and Oxford, he retired from teaching in 1975 and returned to his family’s farm in New Hampshire, determined to make his living as a freelance man of letters. Among his many works of criticism and poetry are Their Ancient Glittering Eyes (1992), a book dedicated to the lives of poets, and Without (1998), a series of elegies for his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995.