Donald Hall and Robert Bly met as students at Harvard in the late 1940s. Over 56 years of friendship and support, they have--between them--published 25 books of poetry, countless works of prose, and have won the National Book Critics' Circle Award, the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, the Caldecott, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, three Guggenheims, the National Book Award, the Lamont Prize, and many, many others. Robert has translated Rilke, Hamsun, Trakl, Neruda, Transtromer, and many others; Don had been called by Dana Gioia, "...the memoirist and the elegist with no living equal;" he has also written a list of children's books already becoming classics. Here are Robert Bly and Donald Hall speaking at a special assembly Tuesday evening:

Donald eventually married the poet Jane Kenyon, who became New Hampshire Poet Laureate, and moved back to his ancestral farmhouse here in Andover. Following Jane's death, Donald--too--was honored as New Hampshire Poet Laureate.

On Tuesday, Robert and Donald took turns reciting and critiquing their work...sharing many recollections and laughs, and accusing one another of being the more sociable (Bly: "I dislike people!") Here he is with Proctor's poet laureate, Laurie Zimmerman:

In 1936, long before he gained fame as the author of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, a scholar at Oxford named J.R.R. Tolkien published a groundbreaking paper that elevated the ancient Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf from a largely historical work to a position as the cornerstone of modern literature. British Literature classes begin with Beowulf. Dan Peterson's class is role playing a modern court case in which the character Beowulf is prosecuted for the murder of the monstrous Grendel.