Who: America’s new poet laureate.

Degree: A.B. ’51

House: Eliot

Hometown: New Haven, Conn.

Current Residence: Wilmot, N.H.

Spotlight: “Laureate,” as it turns out, is Latin for “$35,000 with no strings attached — and we’ll also kick in five g’s for travel costs.” Still, the newly named United States poet laureate intends to stay put on Eagle Pond farm, heading to the nation’s capital only when necessary, he told the Washington Post. Although Hall’s freshly minted title, awarded by the Librarian of Congress on June 14, carries few official duties and only lasts one year (with the possibility of reappointment), Hall hopes to use it as “a pulpit,” he told the New York Times. “If I see First Amendment violations,” he said, “I will speak up.” He also wants to popularize poetry in new venues. An HBO special? An all-poetry satellite-radio station? “I have a terrible miscellany of thoughts,” Hall said.

Enemies: The Crimson, perhaps biased by its rivalry with the Advocate, gave Hall several negative reviews during his undergraduate career: he “goes to unnecessary and near baffling lengths of symbolism,” the paper said in 1950; some of his work is “dull and stereotyped,” it added in 1951. Worst of all, in an Advocate essay on the poetry of Richard Wilbur, A.M. ’47 (a future poet laureate himself), Hall dared to use the word “zeitgeist.” “This reviewer had to look it up and you might have to too,” warned the Crimson’s Paul W. Mandel, A.B. ’51.

Team: The Boston Red Sox. Hey, don’t snicker — a poet can enjoy baseball just as much as the next guy, although, as Hall said in an interview with Poetryfoundation.org, “I don’t get depressed when we lose and am only mildly euphoric when we win.” But beware, left-leaning sports fans: Hall told the Atlantic Monthly in 1996 that “All sorts of people who are madly politically liberal become utterly conservative when they turn to baseball. It’s a place where the conservative inside them can run loose.”

Shaken or Stirred? On his Eliot House days: “Everybody drank all the time back then. We used to have these teas inviting people and it was just pitchers of martinis. We didn’t have any beer; it was just martinis. When Dylan Thomas came, he didn’t like martinis.”

Visitation Rights: Curious poetry buffs can ogle Hall’s homestead on their way to the nearby Eagle Pond Lodge, which hosts weddings, bar and mat mitzvahs, and “learning through adventure” programs for corporate bigwigs — probably not what Hall had in mind when he wrote Here at Eagle Pond.