Daryl Hine

Daryl Hine. Courtesy Malahat Review.

William Daryl Hine (February 24, 1936 - August 20, 2012) was a Canadian poet and translator.

Life

Hine was born in Burnaby, British Columbia (B.C.), the son of Elsie (James) and Robert Fraser Hine, and grew up in New Westminster, B.C.

He attended McGill University in Montreal, 1954-1958. His debut collection of poetry, the 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 3 years. He moved to New York City in 1962 and to Chicago in 1963, earning a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago (UoC) in 1967.

He taught at UoC, at Northwestern University, and at the University of Illinois (Chicago Campus) during the following decade.

He was an editor of Poetry magazine from 1968 to 1978. The correspondence is held at Indiana University.

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

He 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.

During the last years of his life, Hine lived in Evanston, Illinois. He died there of complications from a blood disorder at the age of 76.

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 Award for English-language poetry.
• 2005 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award
• 1986 MacArthur Foundation Fellow
• 1980 Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1957 McGill Poetry Series

Publications

Poetry

• Five Poems. Emblem Books, 1955.
• The Carnal and the Crane. Toronto: Contact Press, 1957.
• The Devil’s Picture Book. Abelard, 1960.
• Heroics: Five poems. France: Grosswiller, 1961.
• The Wooden Horse. New York: Atheneum, 1965.
• Minutes. New York: Atheneum, 1968.
• Resident Alien. New York: Atheneum, 1975.
• In and Out. privately printed, 1975
  • revised as In and Out: A confessional poem. New York: Knopf, 1989.
• Daylight Saving. New York: Atheneum, 1978.
• Selected Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1980; New York: Atheneum, 1981.
• Academic Festival Overtures. New York: Atheneum, 1985.
• Arrondissements. Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 1989.
• Postscripts. New York: Random House, 1990;
  • Knopf, 1991.
• Recollected Poems, 1951-2004. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2009.
• &: A Serial Poem. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2010.
• In Reliquary. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry & Whiteside. 2013. ISBN 9781554552252

Fiction

• The Prince of Darkness & Co. (novel). Abelard-Schuman, 1961.

Non-fiction

• Polish Subtitles: Impressions from a Journey (nonfiction). Abelard-Schuman, 1962.

Translated

• The Homeric Hymns and the Battle of the Frogs and Mice. New York: Atheneum, 1972.
• (And author of commentary) Theocritus: Idylls and Epigrams. New York: Atheneum, 1982.
• Ovid’s Heroines: A Verse Translation of the Heroides. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.
• Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of The Greek Anthology. Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 2001.
• Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Edited

• The "Poetry" Anthology, 1912-1977 (edited with Joseph Parisi). Houghton, 1978.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Plays

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

Echo by Darly Hine

Except where noted, information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

See also

• LGBT poets
• List of Canadian poets
• Timeline of Canadian poetry

External links

Poems

• "Echo"
• Daryl Hine 1936-2012 at the Poetry Foundation

Books

• Daryl Hine at Amazon.com

About

• From the archive: Daryl Hine
• Daryl Hine in the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature.
• "In Memoriam Daryl HIne (1936-2012)" at Contemporary Poetry Review
• "Signs of Genius": John Barton in conversation with Evan Jones about the late Daryl Hine, 2012