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January 1, 2022

The New Year

Carrie Williams Clifford

The New Year comes—fling wide, fling wide the door
Of Opportunity! the spirit free
To scale the utmost heights of hopes to be,
To rest on peaks ne’er reached by man before!
The boundless infinite let us explore,
To search out undiscovered mystery,
Undreamed of in our poor philosophy!
The bounty of the gods upon us pour!
Nay, in the New Year we shall be as gods:
No longer apish puppets or dull clods
Of clay; but poised, empowered to command,
Upon the Etna of New Worlds we’ll stand—
This scant earth-raiment to the winds will cast—
Full richly robed as supermen at last!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 1, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“The New Year” first appeared as “For the New Year” in The Crisis XIX, no. 4 (February, 1920).

Carrie Williams Clifford was born in September 1862 in Chillicothe, Ohio. A poet and activist, she is the author of Race Rhymes (R. L. Pendleton, 1911) and The Widening Light (Walter Reid, 1922). A co-founder and the first president of the Ohio State Federation of Colored Women, Clifford helped form a women’s subset of the Niagara Movement, a predecessor of the NAACP.

The Widening Light
(Walter Reid Company, 1922).

“The Year” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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“Song for the New Year” by Eliza Cook
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Thanks to Joseph O. Legaspi, author of Threshold (CavanKerry Press, 2017), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Listen to a Q&A about Legaspi’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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"The New Year" by Carrie Williams Clifford

The New Year

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Older messages

"Farewell" by Federico García Lorca, translated by Jenny Minniti-Shippey

Before the year ends—make your tax-deductible gift today!

"Venus de Milo: On Being Rediscovered" by Karen Head

"Memorial Hoops" by Reginald Dwayne Betts

"Weather Forecast" by Adélia Prado, translated by Ellen Doré Watson

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