In each issue of Mythic Passages, Michael Karlin points you to some of his favorite poems published on the World Wide Web. In this issue, all of the poems and biographies were selected from the Poetry Daily website. This site presents a new poem each day selected from books, magazines and journals, and has a wonderful archive of past selections. Thanks to Memye Curtis Tucker, a Mythic Journeys guest, for telling us about this site a couple of years ago. We encourage everyone to take a look at it daily.

We'd really like to hear from you, and we'd like to publish some of your comments. Please share your thoughts on the poems with michael@mythicjourneys.org.

Yahrzeit Candle

By Edward Hirsch

Edward Hirsch has published five previous books of poems: For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Wild Gratitude (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), and On Love (1998). He has also written three prose books, including How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national best-seller, and The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2002). A frequent contributor to leading magazines and periodicals, including The New Yorker, DoubleTake, and American Poetry Review, he also writes the Poet's Choice column for the Washington Post Book World. He has received the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and a MacArthur Fellowship. A professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston for seventeen years, he is now President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Of Being

By Denise Levertov

As a child, Denise Levertov (1923-1997) sent her poems to T.S. Eliot, who admired and encouraged her. Born in England and educated at home, she emigrated to the United States in 1948, and became one of the most important American poets of the second half of the 20th century. Levertov ­ who won the Robert Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Lannan Prize ­ was also a staunch anti-war activist and environmentalist. "One of the essential poets of our time" (Poetry Flash), Denise Levertov was an inspiration to generations of writers.

Heroes Have the Whole Earth for Their Tomb

By Adam Kirsch

Adam Kirsch's poems have appeared in Partisan Review and The Formalist. He lives in New York City.