Donald Hall Quotes

Powerful Donald Hall for Daily Growth

About Donald Hall

Donald Hall (1928-2018) was an esteemed American poet, essayist, and editor whose prolific career spanned over six decades. Born on March 20, 1928, in Boston, Massachusetts, Hall grew up in a literary household where his father, Richard, was a book publisher. This early exposure to literature significantly influenced Hall's love for writing. Hall studied at Harvard University and later Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War before returning to academia, earning a doctorate from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Throughout his career, Hall published numerous works that reflected his deep connection with nature and his contemplations on life, aging, and loss. His first collection of poetry, "Exiles and Marriages," was published in 1949 when he was just 21 years old. However, it was his fourth collection, "Beyond Romantic Fancy" (1961), that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In addition to his poetry, Hall wrote essays, children's books, and edited anthologies. One of his most notable works is the memoir "A Special Providence: Prunings from a Blueberry Farm," which chronicles his life on his family's farm in New Hampshire. Hall was also heavily involved in the literary community. He served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2007 and was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 1985, he became a Trustee of the Library of Congress, a position he held until his death in 2018 at the age of 90. Donald Hall's works continue to resonate with readers due to their introspective nature and profound insights into the human condition. His enduring legacy as a poet, essayist, and editor solidifies his place among America's most influential literary figures.

Interpretations of Popular Quotes

"The world is an imperfect place, but if we can't act imperfectly to improve it, then we cannot act at all."

The quote suggests that while the world is flawed, our responsibility lies in attempting to make improvements despite our own imperfections. It underscores the need for action, even if not perfect, as inaction leaves no opportunity for positive change. This understanding encourages us to take steps towards bettering ourselves and the world around us, accepting that progress will be incremental and possibly fraught with errors. Ultimately, it is the continuous striving for improvement that allows us to make a difference.

"Poetry is a search for the truth of things."

This quote by Donald Hall emphasizes that poetry is not just about creating beautiful or rhyming words, but it's a deeply introspective journey to uncover the essence or "truth" behind things. Poetry serves as a means to explore, question, understand, and express life's profound mysteries and complexities. It encourages us to delve deeper into the human experience, shedding light on our shared existence and emotions, and ultimately, striving for a greater understanding of the world around us.

"Nature makes no mistakes, only humans do."

The quote "Nature makes no mistakes, only humans do" suggests that nature operates flawlessly, as it is a product of billions of years of evolution and adaptation. On the other hand, humans often make errors due to their imperfect understanding, misguided intentions, or poor decision-making. This statement reminds us of the inherent wisdom in natural processes and the need for humility and careful consideration when interacting with nature.

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."

This quote by Donald Hall suggests that writing serves a dual purpose: it allows us to experience life intensely in the present, as we grapple with ideas, emotions, and sensory details, and again in reflection, as we revisit those experiences through our words, gaining deeper insights and understanding. In essence, writing offers us the opportunity to savor and appreciate life's richness on two levels.

"A poem should not mean but be."

Donald Hall's quote, "A poem should not mean but be," emphasizes that a poem is an experience or sensation to be felt rather than a straightforward explanation or message to be deciphered. The essence of poetry lies in evoking emotions, creating images, and stirring thought processes, as opposed to merely conveying a concrete meaning. It encourages readers to engage actively with the poem, immersing themselves in its atmosphere and drawing their own interpretations from it.

It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road.

- Donald Hall

Sometimes, Knees, Dropped, Robert

I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.

- Donald Hall

Some, Been, About, Needing

However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy.

- Donald Hall

Alert, Antiquity, However, Unknown

Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.

- Donald Hall

Door, Dangerous, Shut, Wicked

Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.

- Donald Hall

Beauty, Feel, Works, Embody

As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.

- Donald Hall

Ahead, Seventies, Cliffs, Collapsing

We approached Athens from the north in early twilight, climbing a hill. When we reached its peak, we were dazzled to look down and see the Acropolis struck by one beam of the setting sun, as if posing for a picture.

- Donald Hall

Twilight, Beam, North, Early

When I was a child, I loved old people. My New Hampshire grandfather was my model human being.

- Donald Hall

New, Human Being, Hampshire, Old People

In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three.

- Donald Hall

Bad, Prize, Had, Booming

I would work until I got stuck, and I would put it down and pick up something else. I might be able to take a 20-minute nap and get to work again. That way, I was able to work about 10 hours a day... It was important to me to work every day. I managed to work on Christmas day, just to be able to say I worked 365 days a year.

- Donald Hall

Every Day, Year, 365 Days, Stuck

I'm happy to feed the squirrels - tree rats with the agility of point guards - but in fair weather, they frighten my finches. They leap from snowbank to porch to feeder and stuff their cheek pouches with chickadee feed.

- Donald Hall

Happy, Porch, Cheek, Guards

I write longhand; I make changes longhand, and I have an assistant who types it up. She lives 70 yards away. Every afternoon, I have a case I leave out on the porch, and she brings it back the next morning.

- Donald Hall

Next, Away, Next Morning, Longhand

I felt the need to be more open and expressive of my feelings, not just about the hills and the countryside, but about the daily life.

- Donald Hall

Daily Life, More, Need, Hills

When I lived summers at my grandparents' farm, haying with my grandfather from 1938 to 1945, my dear grandmother Kate cooked abominably. For noon dinners, we might eat three days of fricasseed chicken from a setting hen that had boiled twelve hours.

- Donald Hall

Grandparents, Chicken, Had, Noon

I grew up in the suburbs of Connecticut - during the school time of year - but I preferred it in New Hampshire. I preferred the culture, the landscape, the relative solitude. I've always loved it.

- Donald Hall

New, Always, Suburbs, Solitude

It is sensible of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not 'pass away.'

- Donald Hall

Die, Away, Aware, Sensible

Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.

- Donald Hall

Times, Written, After, Understood

On September twentieth every year, I got to choose my menu - meatloaf, corn niblets, and rice were followed by candles on chocolate cake with vanilla icing and a scoop of Brock-Hall ice cream.

- Donald Hall

Corn, Year, Scoop, Ice Cream

In 1975, I quit my tenure, and we moved from Ann Arbor to New Hampshire. It was daunting to pay for groceries and the mortgage by freelance writing - but it worked, and I loved doing it.

- Donald Hall

Doing, New, Hampshire, Freelance

Each season, my balance gets worse, and sometimes I fall. I no longer cook for myself but microwave widower food, mostly Stouffer's. My fingers are clumsy and slow with buttons.

- Donald Hall

Cook, Buttons, Mostly, Season

By 1968, I had lived 10 years in Michigan. Gradually, I had come to love watching Detroit's baseball club in its small, beautiful, antiquated Tiger Stadium - a baseball park as fine as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, though it never got the adulatory press.

- Donald Hall

Love, Small, Wrigley, Stadium

My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books.

- Donald Hall

Nose, Always, Almost, Birthdays

A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century, London's best restaurants are as good as Paris's, but not in the 1950s.

- Donald Hall

Best, London, Fellowship, Depths

In December of 1952, my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia.

- Donald Hall

Wife, Through, Russian, December

New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.

- Donald Hall

Feel, Circles, Smaller, Ceremony

Although I was paid a salary in Ann Arbor, my wife and children and I drank powdered milk at six cents a quart instead of the stuff that came in bottles. I was a tightwad.

- Donald Hall

Wife, Six, Drank, Quart

As I look at the barn in my ninth decade, I see the no-smoking sign, rusted and tilting on the unpainted gray clapboard. My grandfather, born in 1875, milked his cattle there a century ago.

- Donald Hall

Born, Decade, Sign, Ninth

In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.

- Donald Hall

My Life, Young, Virtually, Readings

After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.

- Donald Hall

Claimed, Couple, Exeter, Adolescent

My problem isn't death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down.

- Donald Hall

Death, Old, Standing Up, Sitting

Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence.

- Donald Hall

Die, Old, Demented, Drift

When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It's better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers.

- Donald Hall

Flowers, Over, Lament, Sit

Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.

- Donald Hall

Kind, Line, Prose, Dependent

Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair: the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat.

- Donald Hall

New, Hampshire, Fought, Sheep

I have seen so many poets who were famous, who won all sorts of prizes, disappear with their death. I write as good as I can and don't try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know.

- Donald Hall

Death, Some, I Write, Prizes

Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays.

- Donald Hall

Book, New, Anthology, Essays

I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.

- Donald Hall

War, Very, Whole, Harvard

There's a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want.

- Donald Hall

Deal, Away, Appropriate, Stripping

In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower's day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, while during the Civil War, beards were as common as sepsis.

- Donald Hall

War, Civil War, Fathers, Founding

I think my very best work came out when I was about 60, not when I was 20. I was publishing all the time when I was in my 20s, and some of those poems I still like. And there were a few after 60, and in my 70s, that I like. But they became fewer and fewer.

- Donald Hall

Some, Very, Became, Best Work

I really feel better about aging at the age of 86 than I did at 70.

- Donald Hall

Better, Than, About, Aging

I've had someone, my assistant, type for me. I've done it that way for more than 50 years because I type with one finger, although quite rapidly.

- Donald Hall

More, Finger, Assistant, Rapidly

It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them.

- Donald Hall

Week, Maybe, About, Lines

Divorce was miserable, as it always is, and we divorce for the same reasons we marry.

- Donald Hall

Always, Same, Reasons, Divorce

I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it.

- Donald Hall

Real People, Before, Subject, Creative Writing

One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes.

- Donald Hall

American, Been, Had, Tennis

When I finished my initial year at Oxford, I flew home to marry Kirby, who had been my girlfriend in college. We had met on a blind date.

- Donald Hall

College, Date, Been, Flew

Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.

- Donald Hall

Famous, Poems, Read, Poets

I have to do draft after draft... It takes me a long time, but I love doing it, and I have to do it every day, or I feel slack.

- Donald Hall

Love, Doing, Every Day, Draft

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

- Donald Hall

Think, I Think, Attempting, Partly

I expect my immortality will last about six seconds after my funeral.

- Donald Hall

Expect, Immortality, Seconds, Funeral

When I was 12, I had a fondness for horror movies like the 'Wolfman.' The boy next door said I should read Poe.

- Donald Hall

Door, Next, Fondness, Poe

Obviously, death is ahead of me. I don't look forward to dying one little bit. But, you know, I simply don't worry about it because it's going to happen to me as it does to anybody.

- Donald Hall

Death, Worry, Happen, Simply

Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel.

- Donald Hall

Old Age, Old, Through, Walked

In anything you write - in a short story, a poem - there has to be a counter-motion; it can't go all in one direction.

- Donald Hall

Go, Anything, Short Story, Poem

Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working.

- Donald Hall

Work, Working, Know, Contentment

Some days I feel good about my work, and sometimes I feel I've never written anything worthwhile. That's par for the course.

- Donald Hall

Work, Sometimes, Some, Par

I live in the house my great-grandfather moved to in 1865... I spent all my summers here as a kid haying with my grandfather, and it was my favorite place in the world.

- Donald Hall

Here, Summers, Moved, Grandfather

I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.

- Donald Hall

Always, Prose, Particularly, Ears

Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.

- Donald Hall

Eye, Through, Always, Imagined

Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.

- Donald Hall

My Life, Important Thing, Poems

I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times.

- Donald Hall

Over, Publish, Times, Worked

Everything important always begins from something trivial.

- Donald Hall

Wisdom, Important, Always, Trivial

I don't have a computer. I never have had one.

- Donald Hall

Never, Had, Computer

For better or worse, poetry is my life.

- Donald Hall

Life, My Life, Better, Worse

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