John Hollander was the author of numerous books of poetry. His first, A Crackling of Thorns, was chosen by W.H. Auden as the 1958 volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He also wrote criticism, including the award-winning Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse and The Work of Poetry, and edited or coedited twenty-two collections, among them The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, and American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century. Before his death in August, 2013 he was Sterling Professor emeritus of English at Yale University.
Poetry
Summer 2007
Steep Declension
The fortune-teller was nonspecific: Will I have to fall into some silly well Or smash a borrowed car into a wall? Or fall (as it is often said) quite ill […]
Poetry
Spring 2002
A Rainbow for Lunch
Oh you can eat all them greens, all right (With oil and vinegar), perhaps Adding the violets (which, unlike Nasturtiums, won't taste very good); And the oranges (peeling them carefully), […]
Poetry
Autumn 1992
Final Arrangements
A Liebhaber of possibilities, A connoisseur of loss, I drink the lees Of weakened vintages toward sundown, when The sunlight gleams among the fallen trees. Past sorrows—those our present joys […]
Poetry
Winter 1979
Blue Wine
for Saul Steinberg 1 The winemaker worries over his casks, as the dark juice Inside them broods on its own sleep, its ferment of dreaming Which will turn out to […]
Poetry
Spring 1962
Slepynge Long in Greet Quiete Is Eek a Greet Norice to Leccherie
for Norman and Midge Sunk earlier in the silence of gray cashmere Muffler, the clock had only grown alarmed After my three long burials in the sweet, cool Fields of […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1959
The Metrical Emblem¹
Some remarks entitled “Literature and Language,” R. A. Sayce, an English critic, voiced a complaint which I expect has recently diminished, and will continue to diminish, in force and frequency. […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1958
Catullus
Catullus—The Complete Poetry translated by Frank O. Copley. The University of Michigan Press. $3.75. Catullus is our first great lyric poet. If some of his Greek predecessors might present a […]
Poetry
Autumn 1957
The Sun Dial
“HORAS TEMPESTATIS QUOQUE ENUMERO” for Elena Levin When, in the festival of August heat, The air stops throbbing over the balustrades Bordering the terrazzo, and for a moment The white […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1956
Past Reason Hunted
The Mutual Flame: On Shakespeare’s Sonnets and The Phoenix and the Turtle by G. Wilson Knight. Macmillan. $3.75. The critical literature on Shakespeare’s Sonnets is scandalous. They were largely […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1956
Organized Violence
Russian Formalism, History-Doctrine by Victor Erlich. Mouton and Co. $6.50. The Russian Formalist movement has for the most part remained unknown in America. With the exception of a few […]
Summer 2013
Steep Declension
The fortune-teller was nonspecific: Will I have to fall into some silly well Or smash a borrowed car into a wall?