John Hollander – författare

New and classic essays by one of America's most distinguished contemporary poet-critics, The Work of Poetry 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 A Child's Garden of Verses. 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."

New and classic essays by one of America's most distinguished contemporary poet-critics, The Work of Poetry 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 A Child's Garden of Verses. 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."

Demonstrating a poet’s imaginative ear and a critic’s range of concern, John Hollander here writes about the "melodious guile" with which poetry speaks to us. Through analysis of formal and rhetorical patterns in examples chosen from the whole spectrum of English and American poetry, Hollander describes how poems form self-reflexive parable in order to represent realms beyond themselves. "As astute a book about poetry as anyone has produced in the last five years."—David Lehman, Newsday"A lively and enlivening work of criticism."—Library Journal"Hollander, himself a fine poet, is such a generalist; and Melodious Guile, to my mind the best of his critical books, takes its place . . . among the very few enjoyable and enriching studies of how poetry works."—Alastair Fowler, London Review of Books"An incisive display of beautifully integrated erudition. John Hollander demonstrates, just as post-structuralism is waning, that there are other, more cogent theoretical terms for thinking about poetry and for a return to the reading of poetry."—Robert Alter, University of California, BerkeleyNominated for a 1988 National Book Circle Award in Criticism

This book-length poem by one of the major poets of our era is structured as a series of messages transmitted by a master spy to the director of spy operations and to a number of his fellow spies. The spy speaks of his own alienation and sense of purposelessness as a secret agent—a metaphor for a human existence committed to ordering, deciphering, and making sense of a world of random signs. First published in 1974, the book is now reprinted with a substantial introduction by the author that elaborates on the genesis of the poem, the literary figures who inspired some of the characters, the poem’s reception, and other matters.Reviews of the earlier edition:“These poems can be read and admired for their fluidity, their wonderful diversity of significance. . . . Many delights.”—Richard Poirier, Los Angeles Times“Hollander’s arch and subtle long poem allegorizes the mirror closeness between raveller and unraveller.”—George Steiner, New Yorker“Hollander explores with wit and virtuosity the pleasures of poetry (encipherment) and the trials of the workaday world (one’s ‘cover.’) . . . A rich, intelligent poem . . . a special pleasure for those with an ear for allusions, parodies, and puns.”—Library Journal

In this classic text, 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 new essays for this revised edition, J. D. McClatchy and Richard Wilbur each offer a personal take on why Rhymes’s Reason has played an integral role in the education of young poets and student scholars.  “[Hollander] put everything he knew about the structures of poetry—those fabled magic tricks—into a sort of guidebook for those starting out on the trail up Mount Parnassus. . . . There are astonishments on every page.”—from the Foreword by J. D. McClatchy  “This book’s wit and inventive spirit, its self-describing embodiments of form, now offer the beginning poet a happy chance to discover the technician in himself.”—from the Afterword by Richard Wilbur  “How lucky the young poet who discovers this wisest and most lighthearted of manuals.”—James Merrill  “What the E. B. White–William Strunk The Elements of Style is to the writing of prose, Rhyme’s Reason could very easily become to the writing of verse. . . . Marvelously comprehensive, clarifying and useful, [and] a delight to read.”—John Reardon, Los Angeles Times Review of Books  “A virtuoso performance and a mandatory text for poetry readers and practitioners alike.”—ALA Booklist

Poet, scholar, teacher, editor, and critic John Hollander has been a colossal presence in the American literary community for several decades. He is known for his mastery of prosody as well as for the wit, nuance, and charm of his poetry. Filled with literary, philosophical, and religious allusions, his work has been compared to the neoclassical writers of the seventeenth century. A difficult and rewarding poet, Hollander challenges his readers to bring everything they possess to the reading of each poem, as he does to the writing of them.In The Poetry of Everyday Life, Hollander grapples with issues of poetry and the imagination. In a series of aphorisms, The book's title essay distinguishes between poetry's relations to the rest of life and other kinds of literature that merely deal literally with it. The essay introduces a range of other prose writing, from poetic fictions in prose (which Hollander calls "enigmatic narratives") to literary essays and memoirs of poets such as W. H. Auden, James Merrill, and Anthony Hecht. There are observations on the eternal problem of verse translation, as well as an interview with Langdon Hammer. Unburdened by theoretical agendas, both the short fables and the critical essays in this volume concern various aspects of the ways in which poetry can engage life most strongly when it most deeply regards itself.John Hollander is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Types of Shape, Harp Lake, and In Time and Place, and criticism, including The Work of Poetry and The Gazer's Spirit. He is Sterling Professor of English, Yale University.

In this essay on "what the imagination has made of the phenomenon of echo,” John Hollander examines aspects of the figure of echo in light of their significance for poetry. Looking at echo in its literal, acoustic sense, echo in myth, and echo as literary allusion, Hollander concludes with a study of the rhetorical status of the figure of echo and an examination of the ancient and newly interesting trope of metalepsis, or transumption, which it appears to embody.  Centered on ways in which Milton's poetry echoes, and is echoed by, other texts, The Figure of Echo also explores Spenser and other Renaissance writers; romantic poets such as Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth; and modern poets including Hardy, Eliot, Stevens, Frost, Williams, and Hart Crane.  This book has implications for literary theory and holds great practical interest for students and teachers of American and English literature of all periods.  This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

In this essay on "what the imagination has made of the phenomenon of echo,” John Hollander examines aspects of the figure of echo in light of their significance for poetry. Looking at echo in its literal, acoustic sense, echo in myth, and echo as literary allusion, Hollander concludes with a study of the rhetorical status of the figure of echo and an examination of the ancient and newly interesting trope of metalepsis, or transumption, which it appears to embody.  Centered on ways in which Milton's poetry echoes, and is echoed by, other texts, The Figure of Echo also explores Spenser and other Renaissance writers; romantic poets such as Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth; and modern poets including Hardy, Eliot, Stevens, Frost, Williams, and Hart Crane.  This book has implications for literary theory and holds great practical interest for students and teachers of American and English literature of all periods.  This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

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."

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.

First Published in 2004. From Philip Freneau to Walt Whitman, Herman Melville to Trumbull Stickney, this collection of two volumes, selected by John Hollander, gives an insight into the artform during the nineteenth century. This collection is sorted by author with focus on American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals. An extensive list of works with attention to their chronology and editor notes on the texts within.

‘‘A sonnet is a moment’s monument,’’ said Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a sonnet about sonnets. 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.

In time for this year's Halloween revels comes a horrible array of spectres and sorcerers, ghosts and demons, hags and apparitions. From Homer and Horace via Pope and Poe to Graves and Hardy, Poems Bewitched and Haunted draws on three thousand years of poetic forays into the supernatural. Ovid conjures the witch Medea, Virgil summons 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. Ballads, odes, spells, chants, dialogues, incantations - here is a veritable witch's brew of poems from the spirit world.More than 670,000 copies sold worldwide of our 25 Pocket Poet anthologies.

This is a collection of classic animal poems. The poems include- Robert Burns's "To a Mouse"; Ted Hughes's "Hawk Roosting"; Christopher Smart's "My Cat Jeoffry"; and e.e. cummings's grasshopper-shaped poem.

Contents include poems on Paradises, Gardens of Love, Gardens in the Mind, Gardens and Seasons, Flowers, Gardeners, The Work of the Garden, Gardens of the Wild, City Gardens, Public Gardens, Ruined Gardens, and A Garden of Gardens. Contributors include John Milton, Ovid, E.E. Cummings, Thom Gunn, John Donne, James Merrill, Wallace Stevens, Robert Browning, Shakespeare, and many others.

Some of the poets included in this anthology: Theocritus, Edmund Spenser, Edward Lear, Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, John Donne, Philip Larkin, Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Rossetti, Shelley and Kipling...

Poetry and Music is a passionate and intellectually playful conversation across borders that rethreads long-severed bonds between the two art forms. Hollander's authoritative and accessible criticism guides us through the moments when both modes work in tandem-and leads us to ask why they only sometimes do so successfully. His subjects include hack lyrics in popular music, the effect of setting poetry to music, how music works against enjambment in both metrical and free verse, and musical verse in the works of Donne, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, among others.