Selected Poetry

'Perfection is a rare accomplishment, particularly in American poetry, and the perfection of much of Hollander's work makes it essential reading for anyone who genuinely cares for the craft of poetry. But in our fallen world we seem fated to value power over perfection, and John Hollander's poetry has shown a visionary power just often enough to secure him a place as one of the major figures of our moment.' -Vernon Shetley, The New Republic

JOHN HOLLANDER is the author of more than a dozen 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 wrote eight books of 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, American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, and (with Anthony Hecht, with whom he shared the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1983) Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls.

Mr. Hollander attended Columbia and Indiana Universities and was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. He taught at Connecticut College and Yale, and was a professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. In 1990 he received a MacArthur Fellowship. He died in August 2013.