Daniel Hoffman 1923–2013

Daniel Hoffman was one of the best writers of his generation. He was a folklorist, a literary critic, a memoirist, a poet, and a translator. And he did all of it with such grace and authority that he may well have been taken for granted by the literary world. To say that his poetry has never quite received its due seems strange, since many honors did come his way. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (the post now called poet laureate of the United States), and many of his books were finalists for big awards. And he earned the Aiken Taylor Prize in Modern American Poetry from this magazine, an honor recognizing a lifetime’s achievement. But, despite all this, it remains fair to say that his work, particularly his poetry, has yet to receive the kind of attention it deserves.

I have wondered why this might be so, and have concluded that Dan, who was a good friend of mine, just never pushed himself forward. A man without pretense, he let the work speak for itself and lived in the world with a wry modesty. Yet he was astonishingly ambitious as a poet, writing two booklength poems, a large number of shorter narratives, and lyrics of many types and genres. He was as adept at free verse as he was with meter and rhyme, and he once said in an interview that “a poet, like a musician, should be in command of all of the possibilities of his instrument.” To like-minded poets my age, Dan seemed less our elder than our brother, our friend.

Perhaps, too, it should be said that his performances lacked the kind of theatricality some poets bring to a room. Dan never changed his New York accent, even after some fifty years in the Philadelphia area. He never engaged in the squabbles that mar the lives of so many poets; but he looked on literary competition with the same calmly outraged conscience he brought to bear on the politics of the nation. Dan was a delightful man, warm and funny and interested in what other writers were doing. He offered me plenty of encouragement, but never held back his reservations. To me he was a model man of letters. He just wrote beautifully, as in this small poem that appeared after the death of his wife, the poet Elizabeth MacFarland:

Today the sun rose, as it used to doWhen its mission was to shine on you.Since in unrelenting dark you’re gone,What now can be the purpose of the sun?

Dan and I shared an interest in the work of W. H. Auden. Long before Auden had selected Dan’s first book for the Yale Younger Poets Award, Dan saw the premiere of Paul Bunyan, the opera by Benjamin Britten and Auden, at Columbia University, and became curious about this archetypal American figure. As a result he wrote Paul Bunyan: Last of the Frontier Demigods, considered by some to be a classic of American folklore. Dan’s literary criticism also includes the best book I have ever read about Poe, to which he gave the hilarious title Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (an echo of “The Bells”), as well as studies of Faulkner and Stephen Crane; Form and Fable in American Fiction; and Barbarous Knowledge: Myth in the Poetry of Yeats, Graves and Muir.

He published translations, a memoir of his war years serving as a technical writer in the Army Air Corps, and fourteen collections of poems, starting with An Armada of Thirty Whales in 1954, and ending just this past spring with Next to Last Words, a book that shows no falling off in his strengths as a writer: his lucid authenticity and his unfailing humanity. He could write almost any kind of poem, from the witty and satirical to the colloquial narrative. He was one of our very best narrative poets, particularly in The Middens of the Tribe, his intense psychological study of an American family, and Brotherly Love, his sequence of poems about...