Since 1975, Mr. Hall had lived on a New Hampshire farm that had been in his family for generations. Growing up in suburban Hamden, Conn., he had spent his childhood summers at the homestead and written his first poems there, and he described his return as both a homecoming and a “coming home to the place of language.”

Mr. Hall’s poems often evoke not only place but also an almost geologic sense of time. In “Names of Horses,” he writes:

For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses,

roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,

yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter

frost heaved your bones in the ground — old toilers, soil makers.

He was a staggeringly prolific writer who chose freelance work over teaching — a decision, as Mr. Collins put it, “to detach himself from academic life, with its slow but steady intravenous drip of a salary.”

Mr. Hall was a memoirist, an essayist and the author of textbooks and children’s books. A lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, he wrote two books about baseball, including “Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball” (1976), a lyrical portrait of both the game and the subject that was written with Mr. Ellis, a flamboyant former pitcher for the Pirates and Yankees. (“In the country of baseball,” Mr. Hall wrote, “time is the air we breathe, and the wind swirls us backward and forward, until we seem so reckoned in time and seasons that all time and all seasons become the same.”)

For 23 years Mr. Hall was married to the poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995, and he paid moving tribute to her and their marriage in the collections “Without” (1998) and “The Painted Bed” (2002).

But the bulk of his poetry over a 60-year career emphasizes the cycle of life as it plays out in the natural world and those who live in it, though often in a way with which urban readers could identify. In his 1977 poem “Ox Cart Man,” an ode to persistence and practicality, Mr. Hall describes how a farmer loads his potatoes into a cart and walks beside his ox to market, where he sells the potatoes.

When the cart is empty he sells the cart.

When the cart is sold he sells the ox,

harness and yoke, and walks

home, his pockets heavy

with the year’s coin for salt and taxes,

and at home by fire’s light in November cold

stitches new harness

for next year’s ox in the barn,

and carves the yoke, and saws planks

building the cart again.

Mr. Hall came of age as a poet in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, when the dominant poetic trend was toward a combination of formal structures and a sophisticated yet conversational style. Its leading proponent was W. H. Auden, who had come to the United States in 1939 and was naturalized in 1946, and whose influence on his American contemporaries as well as the younger poets of his day, like Mr. Hall, was incalculable.