John Hollander, 1929–2013

David Bromwich John Hollander, 1929-2013 WE MOURN THE DEATH OF OUR colleague John Hollander, a poet, critic, teacher, and instigator; an energetic participant in the life of the mind. The range of his knowl­ edge was as surprising and delight­ ful as the rapidity of his wit. He wrote about music (and, sometimes, words for music) with the same ease and sharpness of address that he brought to discussions of poetry and prose. A separate anthology could be made of his essays on the visual arts; and in his later years, he helped to start a field of literary criticism on the “ekphrastic” dimen­ sion of writing, which is concerned specifically with the relationship between words and images. Some sense of his speculative reach can be gained from his critical study The Gazer’s Spirit, a series of appreciations of poems that were written explicitly as descriptions of paintings. The poems by which Hollander him self set greatest store were Spectral Emanations, a meditation in verse and prose on the nature of wisdom and imagination, which takes its form from the shape and symbolic meanings of the menorah; and Powers of Thirteen, a sequence of 169 thirteen-line sonnets, written in lines of thirteen syllables each. Just as characteristic of his temper and inventiveness was the handbook Rhyme’s Reason, which explains in the relevant verse-forms the uses of John Hollander, 1929-2013 xxiii meter, rhyme, stanza, and imitative sound, for students and novices of poetiy. Among his other books, the New York sequences Visionsfrom the Ramble and Reflections on Espionage register the vivid blend of erudition, personal piety, and inspired whim that mark all of his best work. Hollander believed that science was not the enemy of wonder and proved it by his conversancy with the history of biology and physics, as well as by the philological depth of the essays collected in Vision and Resonance, Melodious Guile, and The Work ofPoetry. He was perhaps the last, and certainly one of the most impressive, of the poet-critics who domi­ nated American letters for three generations—a company that includes John Crowe Ransom, W. H. Auden, Robert Penn Warren, John Berryman, and Randall Jarrell. But Hollander belonged in fact to an older tribe, for whom an old name must suffice. He was a genuine polymath; and he reflected throughout his writings, and in person, the spirit of generous adventure that the Renaissance associated with that word. xxiv social research ...