Jane Kenyon

(1947 - 1995)

Born in Ann Arbor in 1947 and educated at the University of Michigan, Jane Kenyon moved in 1975 with her husband, the poet Donald Hall, to a farmhouse in central New Hampshire, where they lived together for twenty years. Kenyon, a chronicler of rural life once called “an inward-looking poet of intense emotion,” eventually became the state’s poet laureate. For much of her time in New Hampshire, she suffered from bipolar disorder. “Depression was a third party in our marriage,” wrote Hall. She died of leukemia at the age of forty-seven in 1995.