In the following roundtable discussion, poets Hall, Cynthia Huntington, Heather McHugh, Paul Muldoon, and Charles Simic discuss their favorite poems and what makes them special.

In the following interview, Hall discusses his body of work and the state of contemporary poetry and poetry criticism.

In the following interview, Hall discusses his relationship with his late wife and how he has coped emotionally since her death.

In the following essay, Joseph explores how Old and New Poems is an example of how Hall's poetry has evolved throughout the years and how the collection relates to the genre of American Modernist poetry.

In the following review, Goldstein assesses three examples of Hall's nonfiction works—Principal Products of Portugal, Death to the Death of Poetry, and Life Work,—and explores what these works reveal about his poetry.

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

In the following review, Pollack offers a positive assessment of The One Day and classifies the poem as a modernist work.

In the following interview, Hall discusses the death of his wife (poet Jane Kenyon), his editing of her last collection of poetry, and Without, his own poetry collection about their life together.

In the following excerpt, Looney offers a positive assessment of The One Day, complimenting the poem for its sense of wonder and beauty.

In the following excerpt, McDowell argues that Without is an example of expansive poetry and lacks the sentimentality one might expect from the emotional subject matter.

In the following interview, Hall discusses the process he used to write The One Day and the events that inspired the poem.

In the following positive review, Keen argues that The Museum of Clear Ideas is primarily about how humans cope with endings and issues of closure.

In the following excerpt, Bayley discusses Hall's exploration of grief in Without.

In the following positive review, Ullman compliments Hall's candor and his ability to put his grief into words in Without.

In the following excerpt, Gwynn criticizes Hall's use of publishing sales figures to defend modern poetry in Death to the Death of Poetry.

In the following review, Thorpe offers a mixed assessment of Life Work, faulting the work for indulging in too much “name-dropping.”

In the following review, Sherry offers a positive assessment of both Life Work and The Museum of Clear Ideas.

Donald Hall is a well-established figure on the contemporary American scene. [Kicking the Leaves] serves notice, however, that he is still willing to take a few risks. Kicking the Leaves is a strangely vulnerable work. It asks to be accepted on its own terms, as guileless, brooding and sentimental. Most of the poems were occasioned by Hall's taking possession of the farm in New Hampshire where his grandfather and great-grandfather had lived. Centered as it is around this experience, the book assumes ...

In the following review, Christopherson offers a positive assessment of The Ideal Bakery, calling Hall “one of contemporary literature's gourmet chefs.”

[Biography] is central to Donald Hall's Remembering Poets. His book is mainly a gathering of well-told anecdotes about the author's relations with Frost, Pound, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas. Hall deserves praise for the care he has taken to verify his information, to be accurate, to complete stories of which he knew only a part at first hand. The care is visible everywhere but most attractively in the author's frankness about himself. The refusal to cover up his blunders deepens the appeal a...

[All] the poems in Kicking the Leaves are about death, not food. Their persistent elegiac tone rises first of all from that roast pig, who—apple in mouth—in its anatomical wholeness touches the poet's sense of pity and starts him thinking about ancient modes of cooking when stoves were altars, slaughter was sacrifice, and ceremony attended both the death and the ingestion of animals…. Food takes Donald Hall's heart back to his family's rhythms of seasons and deaths,...

In the following positive review, Schott commends Hall's ability to bring the past to life in Lucy's Summer.

In the following review, the critic offers a positive assessment of Their Ancient Glittering Eyes.

Donald Hall is another of the men-about-Parnassus … which makes it all the more surprising that in the central poems of A Blue Wing Tilts at the Edge of the Sea, four long sequences concerned with a love affair in middle age, he should show such calamitous lack of judgment. For every passage that rings true, is another that turns sickly, and a third that crassly exploits the delicate ironies of love in later years. Ingenuity outpaces feeling, except for a few opening poems and the last section of the...