Daniel Hoffman

Daniel Hoffman (1923-2013). Courtesy Mad Poets Society.

Daniel Hoffman
Born	Daniel Gerard Hoffman April 3 1923 (1923-04-03) New York City, New York
Occupation	Academic, poet, essayist
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Columbia University

Daniel Gerard Hoffman (April 3, 1923 - March 29, 2013) was an American poet and academic, who served as Poet Laureate of the United States.

Life

Hoffman was born in New York City. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Corps, where he served stateside as a technical writer and as the editor of an aeronautical research journal, experiences detailed in his memoir Zone of the Interior. He was educated at Columbia University, earning a B.A. (1947), an M.A. (1949), and a Ph.D. (1956).

In 1954, Hoffman published his debut collection of poetry, An Armada of Thirty Whales. This collection was chosen by W.H. Auden as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets; Auden commended it in his introduction as "providing a new direction for nature poetry in the post-Wordsworthian world." Hoffman went on to publish 10 additional collections of poetry, a memoir, and 7 volumes of criticism. Reviewing Beyond Silence in The New York Times Book Review in 2003, Eric McHenry found Hoffman a poet of remarkable consistency, "no less joyful or engaged at 80 than he was at 25."

Hoffman taught at Columbia University, Swarthmore College, and the University of Pennsylvania (UP), retiring from the latter as Felix Schelling Professor of English Emeritus. The UP's Philomathean Society in 1996 published an anthology of poetry in honor of his efforts to bring contemporary poets to give readings in their halls. He is a chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. From 1988 to 1999, he served as Poet in Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, where he administered the American Poets' Corner.

Hoffman was married for 57 years to Elizabeth McFarland (1922–2005), a poet herself as well as the poetry editor of Ladies' Home Journal, from 1948 until that magazine stopped publishing verse in 1961. In 2008 Orchises Press brought out a selection of McFarland's poems, Over the Summer Water, with an introduction by Hoffman, who continues to live in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Hoffman bears an uncanny facial resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe, about whom he wrote an intriguing study worthy of the master himself.

Hoffman was a named plaintiff in Authors Guild vs. Google (2005), the purpose of which was to prevent Google from providing a complete searchable index of extant books.

Hoffman died in Haverford, Pennsylvania, of heart failure, aged 89.

Recognition

Hoffman was appointed the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1973.

Awards won by Hoffman include the Hazlett Memorial Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry from The Sewanee Review, the Memorial Medal of the Maygar P.E.N. for his translations of contemporary Hungarian poetry, the 2005 Arthur Rense Poetry Prize "for an exceptional poet" from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and several grants and fellowships, including those from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

He received an honorary degree from Swarthmore College in 2005.

Publications

Poetry

• An Armada of Thirty Whales. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (Yale Series of Younger Poets), 1956.
• A Little Geste, and other poems. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.
• The City of Satisfactions. New York: Oxford UP, 1963.
• Striking the Stones. New York: Oxford UP, 1968.
• Broken Laws. New York: Oxford UP, 1970.
• The Center of Attention. New York: Random House, 1974.
• Brotherly Love. New York: Random House, 1981.
• Hang-Gliding from Helicon: New and selected poems. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

Non-fiction

• The Poetry of Stephen Crane. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957.
• Form and Fable in American Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961.
• Barbarous Knowledge: Myth in the poetry of Yeats, Graves and Muir. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

  

  Elliston Shorts Daniel Hoffman, "Awoke into a Dream of Singing"

• Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Pennsylvania Center for the Book.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• Daniel Hoffman profile & 4 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• Daniel G. Hoffman b. 1923 at the Poetry Foundation
• Daniel Hoffman at PoemHunter (3 poems)

Audio / video

• Daniel Hoffman reads at Mad Poets Festival
• Drexel interview with Daniel Hoffman
  • Part 1
  • Part 2

Books

• Daniel Hoffman at Amazon.com

About

• Daniel Hoffman, National Book Festival profile
• Daniel Hoffman at the Center for Programs in Creative Writing
• Hoffman, Daniel Gerrard at the Pennsylvania Center for the Book.
• "Daniel Hoffman, former U.S. Poet Laureate, Dies at 89," New York Times