Walter Rice Hard (1882–1966) was one of the 20th century’s most eloquent American folk poets. Hard’s literary career began in earnest in 1924 when he started writing a regular column for the Manchester Journal. Not entirely satisfied with his own prose sketches and commentaries, he began appending to them short poems, unrhymed, with no apparent scheme of meter or form. In these he found his true medium and an effective way to distill and share with readers his many years of observing people and the dynamics of small-town Vermont life. By 1930, Hard had produced his first collection of poems. Hard also submitted articles to other journals and magazine with national audiences. However it was his poetry that won him near universal acclaim inside and outside Vermont. It is the content rather than the form that drew readers to Walter Hard’s poems. In each sketch, Hard distilled a bit of folklore, a proverb, and expression, phrase, or some other aspect of the character and tradition of Vermont in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.