An astronomer named Geoff Marcy was recently so moved by the seeming demise of his favorite telescope, Kepler -- which has been dutifully orbiting the earth since 2009 -- that he wrote a W.H. Auden-inspired poem about it. The verse reads:

"Kepler was my North, my...

The third of a three-part auction of poet and scholar Roy Davids' extraordinary poetry collection was held this past week at Bonhams Auction House in London (You can read my recap of the previous session here). It featured work by poets ranging, alphabetically, from Charles Lamb to William...

Monday and Tuesday mark the national finals of this year's Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Contest. The 53 regional champions competing this week represent the best of more than 375,000 students that participated from about 2000 schools across the country. Nine finalists will advance to the final competition on Tuesday...

Thursday was National Poem In Your Pocket Day, perhaps the most popular of the many events that highlight National Poetry Month. Poetry lovers across America carried a favorite poem with them to celebrate the art and share their favorite verse.

Here in New York City, where the idea...

The sale of poet and scholar Roy Davids' remarkable poetry collection, part of which took place at Bonhams Auction House in London this past week, offered us a glimpse of just how valuable collectors consider rare poetry manuscripts to be. Lovingly pieced together over 40 years, Davids' collection...

Just in time for National Poetry Month, Penguin has teamed up with app developer inkle to bring you a high-tech, enjoyable way to memorize classic poetry. Poems By Heart from Penguin Classics, released this past week, features impressive artwork, smart design and solid voice recordings.

The free...

April is National Poetry Month, poetry lovers! An annual celebration (since 1996) sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, the event aims to spread the gospel of poetry and celebrate the art's rich past and vibrant present.

Local celebrations will be popping up all over the country. New York's...

Spring officially arrives on Wednesday, a season that has always been seen as a symbol of rebirth and renewal, and the unquestioned darling of poets. But the three poems I've highlighted here aren't traditional songs of praise. In each of them, meditating on the spring leads the author to contemplate...

Cambridge University Press is releasing a new, three-volume anthology of Rudyard Kipling's poetry this month. The "complete" collection features 550 previously uncollected poems and more than 50 previously unpublished poems that editor Thomas Pinney -- an English professor at California's Pomona College -- discovered stashed in private collections...

The manuscript of a poem by Charlotte Brontë is up for auction in London next month. Best known for her novel Jane Eyre, Brontë also wrote hundreds of poems during her lifetime. But an original manuscript in private hands is a rarity, and collectors are flocking to it. This despite...

It may have snowed in Arizona last week, but, according to baseball, spring has already begun. Stephen Strasburg, one of the game's young phenoms, took the mound on Saturday against the Mets, and the Cubs, well, even my Cubs have hope.

Down in Jupiter, Florida, the budding Cardinals' season...

If you know any literary account of Richard III's death in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, you almost certainly know Shakespeare's. The Bard imagined the desperate final moments of the bloody king in a passage that concludes with one of his most famous lines:

Slave, I have set...

A rare poem by Winston Churchill will be up for auction this spring. Churchill wrote the 40-line work "Modern Watchwords" at the turn of the century while serving as an army correspondent in India and Africa (exactly where and when the poem was written isn't known). The verse is handwritten...

Working from home with a cat some mornings, I'm often reminded of Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno," a 1200-line meditation that the poet wrote while institutionalized. Smart's poem is, on the surface, a deliberate consideration of what makes his cat Jeoffry, well, Jeoffry, but it's far more remarkable for...

We can thank the inauguration for the spotlight that poetry has enjoyed these past two weeks. Richard Blanco's excellent inaugural poem has rightfully attracted most of the attention, but the promise of the President's second term had a lot of people feeling poetic. I wrote last week about The Takeaway's...

Richard Blanco may be the president's choice to deliver the inaugural poem on Monday, but folks at the national news radio show The Takeaway are busily composing an inaugural poem in a more democratic way: they're asking everyone to write it.

Oh, yes. Organizers have asked...

While corresponding with a friend about our mutual affection for beers of the IPA variety, I realized that my emails, wherein I usually try to leave trace evidence of my English degree, read like they'd been written by a failed clone of Homer Simpson. Just thinking about beer, it seems,...

Has the resolution behind your New Year's resolution worn off with your champagne headache? Has it sunk in just how hard it is to really change your life? I've collected a few poems that might help.

Rudyard Kipling was a man's man's poet if there ever was one, and...

It's the holiday season, when even Washington, D.C. gets a little poetic. John Hicks of the Washington Post reported last week that the big, bland federal government loosens its tie and sends out an official holiday poem each year. The poem's purpose (here's where the magic ends) is...

A poetry row in the UK last month led to a victory for verse in the country's public schools when the UK's Department of Education awarded a half million pound grant (about $800,000) to the "Poetry by Heart" national recitation competition, organized by the excellent Poetry Archive.

The...