Poem of the Day: ‘Wind in the Grass’

Poet, novelist, critic, and professor Mark Van Doren (1894–1972) numbered among his Columbia University students such literary figures as John Berryman and Thomas Merton. An advocate for liberal education and author of the book by that title, Van Doren was a seminal figure in the Great Books movement and co-founder, with Mortimer Adler, of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. His Collected Poems received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1940. The speaker in this early lyric poem, “Wind in the Grass,” written in rhymed quatrains in common or hymn meter, invites a “weary” listener to find refreshment in observing a small, snakelike movement in the grass, which turns out to be the free and unbounded wind.