John Hollander

Biography

John Hollander was born in New York City on October 28, 1929. He attended Columbia and Indiana Universities and was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows of Harvard University.
He is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including Picture Window (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), Figurehead: And Other Poems (1999), Tesserae (1993), Selected Poetry (1993), Harp Lake (1988), Powers of Thirteen (1983), Spectral Emanations (1978), Types of Shape (1969), and A Crackling of Thorns (1958), which was chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

His seven books of criticism include: The Work of Poetry (1997), Melodious Guile (1988), The Figure of Echo (1981), Rhyme's Reason (1981), Vision and Resonance (1975), Images of Voice (1970), and The Untuning of the Sky (1961).

He has edited numerous books, among them Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poems to Memorize (The Academy of American Poets and Books & Co./Turtle Point Press, 1996); The Gazer's Spirit (1995); Poems Bewitched and Haunted (2005); Animal Poems (1994); The Library of America's two-volume anthology Nineteenth Century American Poetry (1993); The Essential Rossetti (1990); Poems of Our Moment (1968); Selected Poems of Ben Jonson (1961); and The Wind and the Rain: An Anthology of Poems for Young People (with Harold Bloom, 1961). He was co-editor of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature (1973) and Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls (with Anthony Hecht, 1967).

He has also written books for children and has collaborated on operatic and lyric works with such composers as Milton Babbitt, George Perle, and Hugo Weisgall.

About his early work, the critic Harold Bloom said, "Hollander's expressive range and direct emotional power attain triumphant expression. I am moved to claim for these poems a vital place in that new Expressionistic mode that begins to sound like the poetry of the Seventies that matters, and that will survive us."

Hollander's many honors include the Bollingen Prize, the Levinson Prize, and the MLA Shaughnessy Medal, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the current poet laureate of Connecticut, he has taught at Connecticut College, Hunter College, the CUNY Graduate Center, and Yale, where is currently the Sterling Professor emeritus of English.