John Hollander Biography

American poet and critic, born in New York City, educated at Columbia University and Indiana University. Allen Ginsberg was a fellow student and friend at Columbia, though their poetry is entirely antithetical. Hollander has taught at Harvard, Connecticut College, Hunter College, and at Yale. His first book, A Crackling of Thorns (1958), had an Introduction by W. H. Auden, who praised the ‘literariness’ of Hollander's work. Later books include Movie-Going and Other Poems (1962), Visions from the Ramble (1965), Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls (1967; with Anthony Hecht and others), Philomel (1968), Types of Shape (1969), The Night Mirror (1971), Tales Told of the Fathers (1975), Reflections on Espionage (1976), Spectral Emanations: New and Selected Poems (1978), Blue Wine and Other Poems (1979), and Powers of Thirteen (1984). His literary criticism in The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry 1500–1700 (1961) and Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (1975) underscores his own commitment to a poetry based on formal verse. Hollander's own work has always sought the refuge of form, a quality of self-restraint unlike the open forms frequently found in twentieth-century American poetry.