Background
Kenyon, Jane Jennifer was born on May 23, 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Daughter of Reuel Baldwin and Pauline Celeste (Miller) Kenyon.
Kenyon, Jane Jennifer was born on May 23, 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Daughter of Reuel Baldwin and Pauline Celeste (Miller) Kenyon.
Bachelor, University of Michigan, 1970; Master of Arts, University of Michigan, 1972.
Her work is often characterized as simple, spare, and emotionally resonant. Kenyon was the second wife of poet, editor, and critic Donald Hall who made her the subject of many of his poems. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan in 1970 and an Master of Arts in 1972.
Kenyon was New Hampshire"s poet laureate when she died Saturday April 22, 1995 from leukemia.
Four collections of Kenyon"s poems were published during her lifetime: Constance (1993), Let Evening Come (1990), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), and From Room to Room (1978). She spent some years translating the poems of Anna Akhmatova from Russian into English (published as Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, 1985), and she championed translation as an important art at which every poet should try her hand.
When she died, she was working on editing Otherwise: New and Selected Poems. In 2004, Ausable Press published Letters to Jane, a compilation of letters written by the poet Hayden Carruth to Kenyon in the year between her diagnosis and her death.
Kenyon"s poems are filled with rural images: light streaming through a hayloft, shorn winter fields.
She wrote frequently about wrestling with depression, which plagued her throughout her adult life. Kenyon"s poem "Having it out with Melancholy" describes this struggle and the brief moments of happiness she felt when taking an MAOI, Nardil. The essays collected in A Hundred White Daffodils reveal the important role church came to play in her life once she and Hall moved to Eagle Pond Farm.
However, two visits to India in the early 1990s led to a crisis of faith, as Hall (in introductions to her books and in his own memoirs), Alice Mattison, and her biographer John Timmerman have described.
Her poem "Let Evening Come" was featured in the film In Her Shoes, in a scene where the character played by Cameron Diaz reads the poem (as well as "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop) to a blind nursing home resident. Kenyon was also a contributor to Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Artist
( "There is something in me that will not be snuffed out,...)
( The poems in Jane Kenyon’s first book are full of respe...)
(Book by Kenyon, Jane)
(Book by Kenyon, Jane)
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Married Donald Hall, April 17, 1972.