Poet Donald Hall's Final Words In Rhyme Came In 2014 Senate Race

New Hampshire's U.S. Senate race between Jeanne Shaheen and Scott Brown inspired the prolific poet, who died last month.

When the poet Donald Hall died last month at age 89 at his home in Wilmot, New Hampshire, The New York Times called him “a staggeringly prolific writer.”

Hall, who was poet laureate from 2006 to 2007 and who made many appearances on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” “left behind more than 20 books of poems, a dozen or more children’s books, a few plays, two volumes of short stories, textbooks, anthologies, clusters of memoirs and books of essays,” the Times wrote last month in a review of his final book, “A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing 90.”

“One got the impression that, after a long day at his desk, he walked outside and urinated a few final poems into the snow banks around his New Hampshire farm,” Dwight Garner wrote in the review.

So it comes as a bit of a surprise that Hall’s final poem was likely written four years earlier, according to The Times.

In the 2014 U.S. Senate race in New Hampshire, the contest between Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and Republican Scott Brown, inspired Hall to write:

Get out of town,

You featherheaded carpetbagging Wall St. clown,

Scott Brown!

Brown, a former U.S. senator representing Massachusetts, moved to New Hampshire to run in the 2014 election. Brown’s staff was not happy with the poem at the time and called Hall “a partisan poet,” The Boston Globe said. Brown lost the election.

The Globe said of the poem: “It was just three lines long but packed a punch.”

The way Hall described it, according to the Times, was, “Someone put it on the internet and it went bacterial.”

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