The two poems I read for this assignment were Spring Training by Phillip Raisor and A Locked House by W.D Snodgrass. Spring Training is about a baseball game, as the narrator reminisces about his family. A surface level reading of A Locked House is that it’s about a broken-down old home, but it becomes more and more obvious that it’s about a relationship between two people that is crumbling apart.

I enjoyed reading both poems, but the poem I liked the most was A Locked House, so I have chosen to do a deep dive on the author. He was born in 1926, died in 2009, and sometime during his life won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also went by the penname S. S. Gardon’s. Some of his other poems include Hearts Needle and These Trees Stand. He wrote a total of 19 collections of poetry over the course of his life, and most of his poetry was based on his own personal experiences. Despite being considered one of the founders of ‘confessional’ poems, he never considered his poems to be such. Hearts Needle was his first collection of poems, and his last collection of poems was After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches.