John Hollander – författare

John Hollander, poet and scholar, was a master whose work joined luminous learning and imaginative risk. This book, based on the unpublished Clark Lectures Hollander delivered in 1999 at Cambridge University, witnesses his power to shift the horizons of our thinking, as he traces the history of shadow in British and American poetry from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century.Shadow shows itself here in myriad literary identities, revealing its force as a way of seeing and a form of knowing, as material for fable and parable. Taking up a vast range of texts—from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton to Poe, Dickinson, Eliot, and Stevens—Hollander describes how metaphors of shadow influence our ideas of dreaming, desire, doubt, and death. These shadows of poetry and prose fiction point to unknown, often fearful domains of human experience, showing us concealed shapes of truth and possibility. Crucially, Hollander explores how shadows in poetic history become things with a strange substance and life of their own: they acquire the power to console, haunt, stalk, wander, threaten, command, and destroy. Shadow speaks, even sings, revealing to us the lost as much as the hidden self.An extraordinary blend of literary analysis and speculative thought, Hollander’s account of the substance of shadow lays bare the substance of poetry itself.

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

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.From the Hardcover edition.

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.” Donna Seaman has written of John Hollander, “His wise and robustly complex poems span the mind like stone aqueducts or canyon-crossing railroad bridges—awesome works of knowledge and craft, art and devotion.” In this exciting new volume, Hollander shows once again the reach of his poetic imagination.From the Hardcover edition.

In a major review in The New Republic of John Hollander''s two earlier books, Tesserae and Selected Poetry (both 1993), Vernon Shetley said, "John Hollander''s poetry has shown a visionary power just often enough to secure him a place as one of the major figures of our moment."Figurehead, a lively, varied, and technically dazzling book, confirms the statement made by Henry Taylor in the Washington Times: "John Hollander revels in technical challenges of unusual severity and complexity, yet most of his poems also have the emotional heft of something worth pausing over and remembering."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.From the Hardcover edition.

“Perfection is a rare accomplishment, particularly in American poetry, and the perfection of much of Hollander’s work makes it essential reading for anyone who genuinely cares for the craft of poetry.  But in our fallen world we seem fated to value power of perfection, and John Hollander’s poetry has shown a visionary power just often enough to secure him a place as one of the major figures of our moment.”Vernon Shetley, The New Republic

rom one of the most brilliant and widely read of all American poets, a generous selection of lyrics, dramatic monologues, and narrative poems--all of them steeped in the wayward and isolated beauty of Frost''s native New England. Includes his classics "Mending Wall, " "Birches, " and "The Road Not Taken, " as well as poems less famous but equally great.

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.

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.

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.

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.