Today’s Poem: Easter Morning

James Matthew Wilson reads Joseph Bottum

Flowering dogwood (Wikimedia Commons)

Poet, critic, and scholar James Matthew Wilson holds the Cullen Foundation Chair in English at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, where he is founding director of the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing. He is the author of fourteen books of poetry and criticism, most recently the poetry collection Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds. His honors include the Hiett Prize from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and the Parnassus Prize awarded by Memoria College. He has also twice received the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s Lionel Basney Award.

Today Wilson offers a reading of “Easter Morning,” by Poems Ancient and Modern co-founder Joseph Bottum, with exposition of the thought of the poem’s dedicatee, the philosopher René Girard. “Easter Morning” is the opening poem in Bottum’s latest collection, Spending the Winter.