John Hollander (1929–2013)
Author of Poetry for Young People: American Poetry
About the Author
John Hollander has edited several Everyman's Library Pocket Poet volumes, including "Robert Frost", "Christmas Poems", "War Poems", "Marriage Poems", "Animal Poems", & "Garden Poems". He is the A. Bartlett Biamatti Professor of English at Yale University, & the author of numerous books of poetry & show more criticism. He was made a MacArthur Fellow in 1990. (Publisher Provided) John Hollander was born in Manhattan, New York on October 28, 1929. He received a B.A. in 1950 and a master's degree in 1952 from Columbia University and a doctorate in 1959 from Indiana University. He taught at Connecticut College, Hunter College, and Yale University, where he was named Sterling Professor of English in 1995 and retired in 2002. As a young poet, he fell under the influence of W. H. Auden and it was Auden who selected Hollander's first collection of poems, A Crackling of Thorns, for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, which was published it in 1958 with an introduction by Auden. During his lifetime he wrote several collections of poetry including The Night Mirror: Poems, Harp Lake, Tesserae, and A Draft of Light. He also wrote many works of criticism including The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500-1700, Vision and Resonance, The Gazer's Spirit, and The Work of Poetry. He edited the two-volume collection American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century for the Library of America. He died of pulmonary congestion on August 17, 2013 at the age of 83. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Photo by Nigel Beale / flickr
Works by John Hollander
American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume One: Philip Freneau to Walt Whitman (1993) — Editor — 443 copies, 2 reviews
American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume Two: Herman Melville to Trumbull Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals (1993) — Editor — 423 copies, 2 reviews
The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Volume I: The Middle Ages through the Eighteenth Century (1973) — Editor — 212 copies
The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Volume II: 1800 to the Present (1973) — Joint Comp. — 192 copies
The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: Volume II: The Literature of Renaissance England (1973) — Editor — 189 copies
Sonnets: From Dante to the Present (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets) (2001) — Editor — 117 copies, 1 review
Wind & the Rain: An Anthology of Poems for Young People (Granger Index Reprint Series) (1977) 3 copies
Movie-Going, and Other Poems 3 copies
the Selected Poetry of Keats 1 copy
Some Fugitives Take Cover 1 copy
Kinneret 1 copy
Poetry of Restitution 1 copy
Philomel 1 copy
A Hollander garland 1 copy
Associated Works
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (2000) — Contributor — 1,471 copies, 9 reviews
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (1995) — Contributor, some editions — 1,014 copies, 7 reviews
World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time (1998) — Contributor — 499 copies, 2 reviews
Poetry Speaks Expanded: Hear Poets Read Their Own Work from Tennyson to Plath (2007) — Contributor — 158 copies, 2 reviews
The Sophisticated Cat: A Gathering of Stories, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings About Cats (1992) — Contributor — 112 copies, 1 review
The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (2016) — Contributor — 78 copies
Possibilities of Poetry: An Anthology of American Contemporaries (1970) — Contributor — 17 copies, 1 review
Firsts: 100 Years of Yale Younger Poets (Yale Series of Younger Poets) (2019) — Contributor — 15 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1929-10-28
- Date of death
- 2013-08-17
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Columbia University
- Occupations
- poet
literary critic - Organizations
- American Academy of Arts and Letters (Literature, 1979)
- Awards and honors
- Bollingen Prize (1983)
American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award (Literature ∙ 1963)
Poet Laureate of Connecticut
Frost Medal (2007) - Relationships
- Trilling, Lionel (teacher)
- Short biography
- John Hollander wrote and edited numerous books of poetry and criticism including, Picture Window (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) and A Crackling of Thorns (Yale University Press, 1958), which was chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and former poet laureate of Connecticut, he taught at Connecticut College, Hunter College, the CUNY Graduate Center, and Yale, where he was the Sterling Professor emeritus of English. Hollander died on August 17, 2013, at the age of 83.
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- New York, New York, USA
- Places of residence
- Woodbridge, Connecticut, USA
- Place of death
- Branford, Connecticut, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- Connecticut, USA
Members
Reviews
I had intended to post on Naguib Mahfouz's Palace of Desire today, but it sometimes seems that we live in a brilliant, unpredictable universe. And one support for that impression is that David and I received in the mail from a friend of ours who is a big proponent doggerel verse, a package containing Anthony Hecht's and John Hollander's Jiggery Pokery: a Compendium of Double Dactyls. Previously familiar with Hecht only as the author of the Matthew Arnold satire "Dover Bitch," I was show more pleasantly and hilariously surprised to make his acquaintance and that of Hollander in such verses as the following (by Hollander):
Or this one (by Hecht):
Double dactyls have the following rules, as outlined by Hecht and Hollander (a dactyl, for those who don't know, is a three-syllable poetic foot with the first syllable stressed and the second two unstressed):
Hecht and Hollander also argue that any six-syllable word, once used in a double dactyl, can never be used in a different one, although Wikipedia maintains that only hardcore double-dactyl purists still hold to this requirement. This seems like a lot of rules, but once you start reading these little gems your brain begins to incorporate them almost unconsciously; the double-dactyl line is extremely catchy.
And in fact, between the uproarious Introduction, the delightfully tongue-in-cheek footnotes, and the addictive poems themselves, Jiggery Pokery unexpectedly comandeered my entire afternoon. Of course, the side effect of reading sing-song dactylic verse for hours at a time is that the meter gets horribly stuck in one's head, and one starts noticing double dactyls all over the house and in one's normal speech. In the shower I found myself chanting "Birch bark and chammomile, / Deep Cleansing Wash," and both David and I keep bursting out with examples of promising six-syllable words apropos of nothing in particular. ("Sesquicentennial!" "Homogeneity!") Needless to say, the next stage was to begin composing our own examples; also needless to say, mine were all about books.
I imagine "discontinuity" has already been used, by someone somewhere in a double dactyl, but I don't specifically remember it from the book. Here's one on my recent reading:
They are very addictive! And also surprisingly difficult. It's hard to find a good use for that single-word line when you have so few syllables to work with. Very fun, though. This last one is just about the dorkiest joke ever; the first time my friend Alan started talking about Austrian educational and agricultural innovator Rudolph Steiner (which Alan went through a phase of doing quite frequently), I mis-heard him with funny results.
HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS
Higgledy-piggledy,
Benjamin Harrison,
Twenty-third President,
Was, and, as such,
Served between Clevelands, and
Save for this trivial
Idiosyncrasy,
Didn't do much.
Or this one (by Hecht):
FIRMNESS
Higgledy-piggledy
Mme. de Maintenon
Shouted, "Up yours!" when ap-
Proached for the rent,
And, in her anger, pro-
Ceeded to demonstrate,
Iconographically,
Just what she meant.
Double dactyls have the following rules, as outlined by Hecht and Hollander (a dactyl, for those who don't know, is a three-syllable poetic foot with the first syllable stressed and the second two unstressed):
- The poem is composed of two stanzas, each with three lines of two dactyls each followed by a fourth line that ends in a dactyl;
- The first line must be a double dactyl of nonsense language;
- The second line must be the name of the subject;
- The final lines of the two stanzas must rhyme;
- Somewhere in the second stanza there must be a line made up entirely of a single, double-dactylic word ("iconographically," for example).
Hecht and Hollander also argue that any six-syllable word, once used in a double dactyl, can never be used in a different one, although Wikipedia maintains that only hardcore double-dactyl purists still hold to this requirement. This seems like a lot of rules, but once you start reading these little gems your brain begins to incorporate them almost unconsciously; the double-dactyl line is extremely catchy.
And in fact, between the uproarious Introduction, the delightfully tongue-in-cheek footnotes, and the addictive poems themselves, Jiggery Pokery unexpectedly comandeered my entire afternoon. Of course, the side effect of reading sing-song dactylic verse for hours at a time is that the meter gets horribly stuck in one's head, and one starts noticing double dactyls all over the house and in one's normal speech. In the shower I found myself chanting "Birch bark and chammomile, / Deep Cleansing Wash," and both David and I keep bursting out with examples of promising six-syllable words apropos of nothing in particular. ("Sesquicentennial!" "Homogeneity!") Needless to say, the next stage was to begin composing our own examples; also needless to say, mine were all about books.
THE MOONSTONE
Fletteridge metteridge
Gabriel Betteridge
tells a romance with the
aid of Defoe;
The diamond's locational
Discontinuity's
somewhat assuaged by his
pipe and Bordeaux.
I imagine "discontinuity" has already been used, by someone somewhere in a double dactyl, but I don't specifically remember it from the book. Here's one on my recent reading:
MONTAIGNE
Hop-a-lide, pop-a-lide,
Mike of the Mountainside
'way from his wife, to his
tower confined,
Erstwhile Bordelais
Parliamentarian
Aired his opinions, and
then changed his mind.
They are very addictive! And also surprisingly difficult. It's hard to find a good use for that single-word line when you have so few syllables to work with. Very fun, though. This last one is just about the dorkiest joke ever; the first time my friend Alan started talking about Austrian educational and agricultural innovator Rudolph Steiner (which Alan went through a phase of doing quite frequently), I mis-heard him with funny results.
show less
RUDOLPH'S DINER
Old Donji Kraljevec,
Kingdom of Hungary,
Offers a breakfast that's
truly advanced:
All of the produce grown
Biodynamically;
Waldorf school day care on
hand for the staff.
Superb long sequence of poems, all in the voice of the spy 'Cupcake', mostly reporting to his control 'Lyrebird.' Makes me want to read the books (fictions and otherwise) that inspired it. Also contains many reflections on the craft of poetry, here referred to as 'encipherment'.
Embedded within the poem are thoughts on some of his fellow poets -- mostly benign, but he's startlingly harsh on Robert Lowell and Ann Sexton.
Embedded within the poem are thoughts on some of his fellow poets -- mostly benign, but he's startlingly harsh on Robert Lowell and Ann Sexton.
Nice enough collection and the editors tried for variety in time period and theme, but overall it simply didn’t click: it felt like some kind of cohesion was missing. I’m not sure why carols were included as the ones selected are all very well known: I would have preferred the space be used for more poems.
Favorites: extracts from Tennyson ‘In Memorium,’ Robert Bridges ‘Noël: Christmas Eve, 1913,’ T.S. Eliot ‘Journey of the Magi,’ W.S. Merwin ‘Carol of the Three Kings,’ show more John Clare ‘December,’ J.D. McClatchy ‘An Old Song Ended,’ Anthony Hecht ‘Illumination,’ and an extract from Auden ‘For The Time Being.’ I must not share the preferences of the editors as these were the only poems, a very small percentage, that resonated with me, but perhaps additional reads in future years will change my mind. show less
Favorites: extracts from Tennyson ‘In Memorium,’ Robert Bridges ‘Noël: Christmas Eve, 1913,’ T.S. Eliot ‘Journey of the Magi,’ W.S. Merwin ‘Carol of the Three Kings,’ show more John Clare ‘December,’ J.D. McClatchy ‘An Old Song Ended,’ Anthony Hecht ‘Illumination,’ and an extract from Auden ‘For The Time Being.’ I must not share the preferences of the editors as these were the only poems, a very small percentage, that resonated with me, but perhaps additional reads in future years will change my mind. show less
Most of these patriotic poems are familiar to many adult Americans, or at least some lines are. I found out my husband only knows the last lines of Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, so he just got educated. Good selection. Not overly gung-ho/ we're #1, just why we are grateful to live here.
Includes, for example, a poem by a native american, at least one by an immigrant, and the one on the Statue of Liberty that welcomes the "huddled masses." Remind me again why the heck my taxes are show more going to build a border wall?
(Rhetorical rant, no reply desired.)
Entire series, including this, highly recommended. show less
Includes, for example, a poem by a native american, at least one by an immigrant, and the one on the Statue of Liberty that welcomes the "huddled masses." Remind me again why the heck my taxes are show more going to build a border wall?
(Rhetorical rant, no reply desired.)
Entire series, including this, highly recommended. show less
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