SOURCE: McNair, Wesley. “A Government of Two.” Iowa Review 28, no. 1 (spring 1998): 59-71.

In the following essay, McNair explores Kenyon's relationship with her husband, Donald Hall, and underscores the overt and the subconscious influences they had on each other's work.

Two or three years ago, something happened to my friends Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon that I'd never seen in the literary world before. Up to that time each was well known to poetry audiences—he as a senior American poet and recent recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, she as a younger poet with a growing reputation. Then, their relationship itself became famous. Through their co-readings, their joint interviews in print and on the PBS show “Fresh Air,” and most importantly, their starring roles in the Bill Moyers special, “A Life Together,” millions of Americans came to know of the life in poetry the two shared...