Daryl Hine

Daryl Hine (born 24 Feb 1936) is a Canadian poet and translator.

Life
Hine was born in Burnaby, British Columbia, the son of Robert Fraser and Elsie James Hine, and grew up in New Westminster, B.C. He attended McGill University in Montreal 1954-58. His first chapbook, The Carnal and the Crane, was published as part of Louis Dudek's McGill Poetry Series in 1957.

Hine then went to Europe on a Canada Council scholarship, where he lived for the next three years. He moved to New York in 1962 and to Chicago in 1963, taking a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago in 1967. He taught there and at at Northwestern University and at Illinois University (Chicago Campus) during the following decade while he served as editor of Poetry Magazine. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1986.

He was an editor of Poetry magazine, from 1968-78. The correspondence is held at Indiana University.

His work appeared in the New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New Yorker, The Tamarack Review, The Paris Review,

He first came out as gay in his 1975 work In & Out, which was initially available only in a privately-printed version in limited circulation. The work did not gain general publication until 1989.

Writing
Alexander Lewis, The Critical Flame: "Hine is less an oracle than a high-energy technician. A recurring metaphor is nuclear fusion — its poetic procedures putting mundane, household elements under graceful pressure until they fuse together into a new substance, dense and glowing in contrast to their prosaic ingredients."

Governor General's Award Jury citation: "Daryl Hine's is a cultured voice. It avoids stuffiness, egoism and shallow ironies. At the centre of this hailstorm of rhyme is a calm - one made of seeming trifles, yet with thinking that is profound. It is a reflection on civilization as a whole, and is the summing up of a life in particular weighed against eternity."

Bryn Mawr Classical Review: "In Puerilities, Hine has beautifully re-created Book XII of the Greek Anthology; it stands as a translation, and as a poetic achievement in its own right. Puerilities entertains, and can move one too."

New York Times: "Daryl Hine, celebrated for translations of the Homeric Hymns and Theocritus, has embarked on his own autobiography in classical disguise in Academic Festival Overtures. Though the poem is written in self-proclaimed alexandrines (by alternating 13 and 12 syllables), its indented patterning is suggestive rather of Ovid (part Tristia, part Amores). The narrative impulse races through long paragraphs, while a rhyme scheme insistently coagulates internal elements into epigrammatic quatrains. It is a virtuoso achievement, as remarkable in its way as anything by Auden. It is also a remarkable record of a yearning, bookish and inhibited boyhood.

Poetry (Chicago): "Hine's robust language ... gleams with what sonneteers used to call sprezzatura, the confident, making-it-look-easy gloss that greases great art."

Notes and Queries: "At certain moments, in reading him, one has the startled sense that language has arrived at a kind of impasse which only a quick scintillation of wit – in the form of a sly rhyme, a subtle pun or an extravagant rhetorical flourish – can grace, if not elude. As a result, Hine’s poems, unlike the brittle pirouettes of the formalist, seem to take shape, in all their glistening eloquence, hot from some secret forge...Hine succeeds at something which once was commonplace but has now become sadly rare: he writes poems which give pleasure to the reader."

Virgina Quarterly Review: "One cannot write about Daryl Hine without using words like 'bravura' and 'virtuosity'."

Recognition

 * 2010 Finalist, Governor-General's Literary Award for Poetry
 * 2005 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award
 * 1986 MacArthur Foundation Fellow
 * 1980 Guggenheim Fellowship

Works

 * (novel)
 * (nonfiction)

Poetry



 * (privately printed, 1975)
 * {Atheneum, 1981}
 * (Knopf (New York, NY), 1991)
 * (privately printed, 1975)
 * {Atheneum, 1981}
 * (Knopf (New York, NY), 1991)
 * (privately printed, 1975)
 * {Atheneum, 1981}
 * (Knopf (New York, NY), 1991)
 * {Atheneum, 1981}
 * (Knopf (New York, NY), 1991)
 * (Knopf (New York, NY), 1991)

Plays

 * A Mutual Flame (radio play), BBC, 1961.
 * The Death of Seneca, produced in Chicago, 1968.
 * Alcestis (radio play), BBC, 1972.

Translations

 * (And author of commentary) Theocritus: Idylls and Epigrams, Atheneum, 1982.
 * (And author of commentary) Theocritus: Idylls and Epigrams, Atheneum, 1982.
 * (And author of commentary) Theocritus: Idylls and Epigrams, Atheneum, 1982.