John Hollander

At 83 years old, John Hollander physical status not available right now. We will update John Hollander's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

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.

Also known for his translations from Yiddish. Hollander usually wrote his poems on a computer, but if inspiration struck him, he offered that, "I've been known to start poems on napkins and scraps of paper, too."

Hollander was considered to have technical poetic powers without equal, 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 Hollander's imagination, giving a fusion of metaphors that enabled Hollander 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. Hollander taught him that it was possible to build a life around the task of writing poetry. Kirchwey recalled Hollander's passion: 'Since he is a poet himself ... he conveyed a passion for that knowledge as a source of current inspiration.'

Hollander also served in the following positions, among others: member of the board, Wesleyan University Press (1959–62); editorial assistant for poetry, Partisan Review (1959–65) and a contributing editor, of Harper's Magazine (1969–71). and also commenced his other role 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".

Source

• 2006: Appointed Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut (term ended in 2011)
• 2006: Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award
• 2002: Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement
• 1990: MacArthur Fellowship
• 1983: Bollingen Prize for Powers of Thirteen.
• 1979: elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Department of Literature
• 1958: Yale Series of Younger Poets for his first book of poems, A Crackling of Thorns, chosen by W. H. Auden.