John Hollander

John Hollander (October 28, 1929 – August 17, 2013) was an American poet and literary critic. At the time of his death, he was Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University, having previously taught at Connecticut College, Hunter College, and CUNY Graduate Center. He was a 1990 MacArthur Fellow and poet laureate of Connecticut 2007–2009.

Early life and education John Hollander was born on October 28, 1929, in Manhattan to Muriel (Kornfeld) and Franklin Hollander, Jewish immigrant parents. He was the elder brother of Michael Hollander (1934–2015), a distinguished professor of architecture at Pratt Institute. He attended the Bronx High School of Science and then Columbia College of Columbia University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling and overlapped with Allen Ginsberg (Hollander's poetic mentor), Jason Epstein, Richard Howard, Robert Gottlieb, Roone Arledge, Max Frankel, Louis Simpson and Steven Marcus. At Columbia, he joined the Boar's Head Society. He was a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. After graduating, he supported himself for a while by writing liner notes for classical music albums before returning to obtain an MA in literature and then a PhD from Indiana University.

Career Hollander stressed the importance of hearing poems out loud: "A good poem satisfies the ear. It creates a story or picture that grabs you, informs you and entertains you". The poet needs to be aware of the "sound of sense; the music of speech". To Hollander, verse was a kind of music in words, and he spoke eloquently about their connection with the human voice. as exampled by his "Powers of Thirteen" poem, an extended sequence of 169 (13 × 13) unrhymed 13-line stanzas with 13 syllables in each line. These constraints liberated rather than inhibited his imagination, giving a fusion of metaphors that enabled him to conceive this work as "a perpetual calendar". Hollander also composed poems as "graphematic" emblems (Type of Shapes, 1969) and epistolary poems (exampled in Reflections on Espionage, 1976), and, as a critic (in Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form, 1975), offered telling insights into the relationship between words and music and sound in poetry, and in metrical experimentation, and 'the lack of a theory of graphic prosody'.

Hollander influenced poets Todd LaRoche and Karl Kirchwey, who both studied under Hollander at Yale. He taught Kirchwey that it was possible to build a life around the task of writing poetry. Kirchwey recalled Hollander's passion: His other role was as a poetry critic.

Hollander's poetry has been set to music by Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, and others; in 2007 he collaborated with the Eagles, allowing them use of his poem "An Old Fashioned Song" to create the song "No More Walks in the Wood".

Personal life and death Hollander resided in Woodbridge, Connecticut, where he served as a judge for several high-school recitation contests. He said he enjoyed working with students on their poetry and teaching it. With his ex-wife, Anne Loesser (daughter of pianist Arthur Loesser; married 1953–77), he was the father of writer Martha Hollander and uncle of the songwriter Sam Hollander. He married Natalie Charkow in 1981.

Hollander died at Branford, Connecticut, on August 17, 2013, at the age of 83.

Awards and honors 2006: Appointed Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut (term ended in 2009) Spectral Emanations: New and Selected Poems (1978) Blue Wine (1979) poems The Figure of Echo (1981) criticism Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse (1981, 1989, 2001, 2014) manual of prosody Powers of Thirteen (1983) poems In Time and Place (1986) poems Harp Lake (1988) poems Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (1988) Some Fugitives Take Cover (1988) poems The Essential Rossetti (1990), editor Tesserae and Other Poems (1993). Included by Harold Bloom in his Western Canon. Selected Poetry (1993). Included by Harold Bloom in his Western Canon. American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (1993), editor Animal Poems (1994) poems The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (1995) criticism Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poems to Memorize (1996), editor The Work of Poetry (1997) criticism The Poetry of Everyday Life (1998) criticism Figurehead and Other Poems (1999) poems Sonnets. From Dante to the present (2001), Everyman's library pocket poets. Picture Window (2003) American Wits: An Anthology of Light Verse (2003), editor Poems Bewitched and Haunted (2005), editor A Draft of Light (2008), poems The Substance of Shadow: a Darkening Trope in Poetic History (2016), lectures