Donald Hall (1928–2018) was born in Connecticut and lived and worked on his great-grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire. Across more than six decades and twenty books of poetry, Hall’s New England practicality, tenacious passion, and intellectual independence marked a path for literature. His memoir Unpacking the Boxes, published on his eightieth birthday, is excerpted as “Gaudeamus Igitur” in our Library. Hall was a noted essayist, children’s book author, fiction writer, and a US Poet Laureate. Among his many publications are the essay collections Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses: Notes on Nearing Ninety.

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An Essay

by Donald Hall

An op-ed in the Boston Globe, remarking on near corpses who keep on doing what they’ve always done, compared me to Mick Jagger. Never before had I been so honored. The columnist mentioned others: Keith Richards, Alice Munro, and William Trevor, who was born the same year I was. At seventy-one, Jagger is a juvenile among us eighty-six-year-olds—but his face as he jumps and gyrates resembles something retrieved from a bog.

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