SOURCE: “‘Building the House of Dying’: Donald Hall's Claim for Poetry,” in Agni, Vol. 47, 1998, pp. 175–83.

In the following essay, Walsh discusses the role of history and modernity in The One Day.

“In my head for a long time I called it Building the House of Dying.”

—Hall on the book that became The One Day

“Diatribes from our current art-bashers—columnists, senators, fundamentalists—bring nothing new to our culture,” says Donald Hall, characteristically blunt in his most recent collection of literary essays, Death to the Death of Poetry (1994). “America's eminent know-nothings have always understood: Artists are sissies providing pastimes for rich folks.” His italics, his sarcasm. Hall's not here to help pass the time. He's more ambitious than that. He's nothing if not ambitious. “As I like to say,” he writes in his paean to vocation, Life Work, “I average four books a year—counting revised editions of...