Works by
John Hollander
(Poet)
[October 28, 1929 - ]

Anthologies

• Sonnets: From Dante to the Present (2001)
  The sonnets in this collection--whether they capture moments of perception, recognition, despair, or celebration--reveal how great an amount of feeling, insight, and experience can be concentrated into a mere fourteen lines.
  
  Here are classics such as Milton's "On His Blindness," Yeats's "Leda and the Swan," and Frost's "The Oven Bird," juxtaposed with the mischievous wit of Rupert Brooke's "Sonnet Reversed," the lyric defiance of Mona Van Duyn's "Caring for Surfaces," and the comic poignancy of Philip Larkin's "To Failure." From the lovelorn laments of Dante and Petrarch to the artful heights of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, from the masterpieces of Wordsworth and Keats to the innovations of Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and James Merrill, the sonnet has proved both versatile and enduring.
  
  This delightful anthology displays the incredible range and power of the verse form that has inspired poets across the centuries.

• Signet Classic Poets of the 17th Century, Vol. 2An Anthology of About 250 Poems and Extracts by 100 Poets of the 17th Century (1974), John Broadbent and John Hollander, eds.

As Editor

• Poems Bewitched and Haunted (2005)
  A delightfully ghoulish array of specters and sorceresses, witches and ghosts, hags and apparitions haunt these pages–a literary parade of phantoms and shades to add to the revelry of All Hallow’s Eve.
  
  From Homer to Horace, Pope to Poe, Randall Jarrell to James Merrill, Poems Bewitched and Haunted draws on three thousand years of poetic forays into the supernatural. Ovid conjures the witch Medea, Virgil channels Aeneas’s wife from the afterlife, Baudelaire lays bare the wiles of the incubus, and Emily Dickinson records two souls conversing in a crypt, in poems that call out to be read aloud, whether around the campfire or the Ouija board. From ballads and odes, to spells and chants, to dialogues and incantations, here is a veritable witches’ brew of poems from the spirit world.

• Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls (1997) with Anthony Hecht with Milton Glaser, illustrator

• The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: Volume I: The Middle Ages through the Eighteenth Century (1973), Frank Kermode and John Hollander, eds.

• The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: The Literature of Renaissance England (1973), John Hollander and Frank Kermode, eds.

• The Wind and the Rain: An Anthology of Poems for Young People (1961, 1977) editor with Harold Bloom

Criticism

• The Work of Poetry (1997)
  New and classic essays by one of America's most distinguished contemporary poet-critics, surveys an extraordinary range of poets, from Dante to May Swenson, and George Meredith to Marianne Moore, as well as works from the Psalms to By turns generous and uncompromising, Hollander champions the enduring force of poetry against the incursion of fashionable writing. This is an elegant, uncompromising affirmation of the extraordinary powers of poetic imagination from a poet whose poems have been hailed by J. D. McClatchy as "ways of thinking on paper."

• The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (1995)
  In a lavishly illustrated study, an eminent poet and literary scholar at Yale University explores the connections between poetry and the visual arts as seen in more than fifty great works from antiquity to the present.

• Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse (1981)
  In his classic text, Rhyme's Reason, the distinguished poet and critic John Hollander surveys the schemes, patterns, and forms of English verse, illustrating each variation with an original and witty self-descriptive example. In this substantially expanded and revised edition, Hollander adds a section of examples taken from centuries of poetry that exhibit the patterns he has described.

• The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (1981)

• Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (1975, 1985)

• Images of Voice, Music, and Sound in Romantic Poetry (1970)

Music

• Philomel (1964)

Non-fiction

• Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (1988)

• The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry 1500-1700 (1961)

Poetry

• Figurehead: And Other Poems (2009)

• A Draft of Light (2008)
  A glorious new collection from one of our most distinguished poets.
  
  Here are poems that explore the ways in which ordinary objects open doors to the more hidden, subconscious truths of our inner selves: a bird of “countless colors” calls to mind “the echo . . . / of an inner event / From my forgotten past”; a subway bee sting conjures up quick unlikely visits by the muses—a momentary awareness that is “as much of a / Gift from those nine sisters as / Is ever given.”
  
  Other poems lay bare the imperfect nature of our memories: reality altered by our inevitably less accurate but perhaps “truer” recall of past events (“memory— / As full of random holes as any / Uncleaned window is of spots / Of blur and dimming—begins at once / To interfere”). Still others examine the dramatic changes in perspective we undergo over the course of a lifetime as, in the poem “When We Went Up,” John Hollander describes the varied responses he has to climbing the same mountain at different points in his life.
  
  In all of the poems Hollander illuminates the fluid nature of physical and emotional experience, the connections between the simple things we encounter every day and the ways in which the meaning we attribute to them shapes our lives. Like the harmonious coming together of bandstand instruments on a summer afternoon, he writes, most of what we come to know in the world is “A dying moment / Of lastingness thenceforth / Ever not to be.”
  
  Throughout this thought-provoking collection, Hollander reveals the ways in which we are constantly creating unique worlds of our own, “a draft of light” of our own making, and how these worlds, in turn, continually shape our most basic identities and truest selves.

• Picture Window (2003)
  In this deeply philosophical and highly inventive new collection, John Hollander, the distinguished author of numerous books of poetry, offers profound yet playful meditations on the reflective mind and on the words with which we come to know the world. In forms as varied as sonnets, songs, and ancient odes, he muses over the ways we use (and misuse) language as “we grasp the world by ear, by heart, by head / And keep it in a soft continuingness.”
  
  Here, too, are striking verses about the passage of time as recorded by the movement of light and shadow across a surface, whether it be the face of a clock or the enclosed walls of a Hopper painting. Throughout, Hollander delights us with mirrors, palindromes, and strange and surprising reversals that keep the mind ever alert with the challenge “to make words be themselves, taking time out / From all the daily work of meaning, to / Make picture puzzles of what they’re about.”

• Figurehead and Other Poems (1999, 2009)
  One of the most gifted of W.H. Auden's choices for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Hollander has pursued the wide range and metrical brilliance of Auden's own poetry, so that this new book exhibits both a large compass of subject matter (from philosophical matters to personal narrative) and, as usual, some astonishing meditations on paintings - here, by Charles Sheeler, Rene Magritte, and Edward Hopper. By turns witty, touching, profound, mocking, ingenious, and always clever, Hollander's poems are a joy for the reader. He is a modern master.

• Animal Poems (1994)
  An anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet praises the whale. Shakespeare sympathizes with the hunted hare. Marianne Moore tries to catch a jelly-fish. Virgil and Emily Dickinson contemplate Bees. Kipling lulls a baby seal to sleep. From East to West, from ancient times to modern, from Mei Yu Ch'en on swarming mosquitoes to William Cullen Bryant's solitary waterfowl and Rainer Maria Rilke's enchanted gazelle, from Auden on cats and dogs to E.E. Cummings's verse in the shape of a grasshopper to James Merrill's vision of the octopus, here--selected by John Hollander--are 136 poems that provide exhilarating access to literature's glorious lyric zoo.

• Selected Poetry (1993)

• Tesserae and Other Poems (1993)

• Harp Lake (1988)

• In Time and Place (1986)
  In this major new collection, John Hollander displays the elegance, versatility, and wit that mark him as perhaps the most urbane poet in America. "In Time and Place" features a generous offering of new verse, an extended prose piece, and a series of prose poems previously available only in a rare, privately published edition.
  
  The tightly rhymed quatrains of the new poems demonstrate once again the freedom Hollander achieves through mastery of form. The consummate control with which he writes in memoriam to a lost love and a time of absence gives him opportunities to move through dimensions most poets never see. His purgatorial mock-journal--dwelling on loss and gain, on difference and effacement, on places and the place of writing--leads into a sequence of captivating prose poems, where imagination centers on the word and language celebrates its own creation.

• Powers of Thirteen (1983)

• Blue Wine (1979)
  John Hollander's "Blue Wine and Other Poems," his first collection of verse since the appearance of his new and selected poems, "Spectral Emanations," shows one of our best poetic craftsmen in America moving into a new phase in his distinguished career.
  
  Poems on painting and sculpture, in which Hollander examines the static/dynamic interaction of life and art, are balanced against a graceful lyric cycle, which is itself a commentary on the meaning of art songs. The longer poems in this volume--"Blue Wine," "Monuments," "The Train," and "Just for the Ride"--move beyond Hollander's unique blend of meditative elegance, closely observed detail, and learned wit. They explore even further the realms of mythological vision beyond the boundaries of easy irony.
  
  Of the title poem, "Blue Wine," Hollander writes, "I visited Saul Steinberg one afternoon and found that he had pasted some mock- (or rather, visionary) wine labels on bottles, which were then filled with a substance I could not identify. This poem is an attempt to make sense out of what was apparently in them."

• Spectral Emanations: New and Selected Poems (1978)

• Reflections on Espionage: The Question of Cupcake (1976, 1999)
  This book-length poem is structured as a series of messages transmitted by a master spy to the director of spy operations and a number of his fellow spies. The spy speaks of his own alienation and sense of purposelessness as a secret agent.

• Tales Told of the Fathers (1975)

• The Night Mirror (1971, 1979)

• Types of Shape (1968, 1991)
  This book is a collection of pattern poems - poems whose printed format presents a picture of some familiar object that is also the subject of the text. Patterned poems, also called shaped verse, are part of a long tradition that extends from Alexandrian Greek poets to Lewis Carroll and beyond. The poems in this book, written by the poet John Hollander, are on subjects ranging from a beach umbrella and a popsicle to time, love and idea. First published in 1969, the new (1991) book has now been expanded to include ten recent poems in addition to the original 25, plus an introduction in which Hollander reflects on what a shaped poem is and how and why he wrote them. There are also explanatory comments for each poem.

• Visions from the Ramble (1965)

• Movie-Going (1962)

• A Crackling of Thorns (1958)

Other

• The Best American Poetry 1998 (1998), David Lehman and John Hollander, eds.

See also:

• Biography - John Hollander (2007)
  An article from: Contemporary Authors Online by Gale Reference Team, Digital - HTML)