# John Hollander

John Hollander (October 28, 1929 – August 17, 2013) was an American poet and literary critic.

## Quotes

* Poetry may be written on paper, but it’s an oral art.A good poem satisfies the ear .It creates a story or picture that grabs you.
** Quoted in 'Venerable Poets :Words to Pop Music beat 'by Cynthia Wolfe Boyton.
* Rhythm and repetition of sounds, words and phrases make spoken poetry sound different to ordinary discourse.
* Reading a poem aloud by someone who understands it, can be a crucial experience, but better yet is reading it aloud oneself.
* Reciting a poem aloud, you are not like an actor, rather you come to understand, then to be, the voice of the poem itself.
* The more you understand a poem and its complexities and depth, the more you will be able to do when reading it aloud.
* Central also to reading verse aloud is the handling of enjambment, ..the interplay of line-end and sentence-flow.
* Contrastive stress is very important in English, as poems are full of invisible italicised contrasts of this kind.
** introduction-John Hollander ed.'Committed to Memory' Riverhead Books New York 1996 ISBN 1573226467
* Not being a philosopher I've had to work through my feelings and puzzlements in poems.
* A teacher (of poetry) has to know and feel what poetry is , and be able - and this is crucial- to read it aloud effectively.
** 'A Conversation with John Hollander' (by email) by Paul Devlin vol 1 St. John's University Humanities Review April 2003
* I revise very little. I always write in long hand and revise when I type. I test them out when I read them aloud.
* Inspiration comes within a framework. A poem that gets out of hand is not a poem.
* I usually seem to finish a poem when I write it down. I may have been carrying the notion around in my head.
* I find free verse very, very difficult to write.
* Great poems are all fables about life.
* Ultimately poetic thought is interpretive.
* You can teach the writing of verse..like prose..an instrument..and the recognition of true poetry. The rest, writers must teach themselves.
** Interview with J D McCarthy 'The Art of Poetry' no 35 Fall 1985
* Metre is to rhythm as eye is to ear.
** 'Vision and Resonance:Two senses of Poetic Form' OUP London 1975
* English Prosody has tended to be a subject for cranks.
** Derek Attridge 'Review of 'Vision and Resources' MLR vol.72 no 3 July 1977
* The warfare between poetry and philosophy certainly started with Plato, who was both poet and philosopher.
* Major poetry not only 'employs' metaphor, irony and other tropes (and is of them) but always and explicitly or implicitly considers the nature of the trope itself.
* For the poet, the biblical sense of 'know' is as much part of nature as the heat of fire, and in the cognative sense as much a given phenomonen as the brightness itself.
* The large (in English) unphilosophical, 'poetic' or 'religious' questions are elicited from their precise and technical microcosms.
* One crosses the brink of literalness into poetry by desiring , noticing, fixing on something and wondering what to make of it.
** Review of 'Stanley Cavell and the Claim to Reason' Critical Inquiry, vol 6, no 4 Summer 1980 U of C P
* 'Poetic form' is a very deep matter that covers much more than phonological or typological pattern.
** Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse, Fourth Edition
* Poetic form, as we know it, is an abstraction from, or residue of musical form.... The ghost of oral poetry never vanishes...all poetry was originally oral.
** Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse, Fourth Edition
* The study of rhetoric distinguishes between tropes, or figures of meaning such as metaphor and metonymy, and schemes, or surface patterns of words. Poetry is a matter of trope; and verse, of scheme or design.
** Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse, Fourth Edition
* The blueprints of verse can be used to build things made of literal, or nonpoetic material, which is why most verse is not poetry.
** Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse, Fourth Edition
* The building blocks of poetry itself are elements if fiction -fable, 'image', metaphor-all the material if the nonliteral.
** 'Rhyme's Reason':a guide to English Verse Yale University Press, 1981
* Very few writers of verse can read their work to keep their listeners aware of the beauty of sense, that sense of beauty from the powerful , delicate ways in which sense is made by poetry.
** 'Poetry' September 1995

## Poetry Quotes

* We and the trees and the way Back from the fields of play Lasted as long as we could No more walks in the wood
** Extract-last verse from 'An Old Fashioned Song' in 'Tesserae and other poems' (1993)
* Winter wields only the spades, Summer brandishes Hot, black clubs, Spring shower hearts about and Autumn shows A fall of diamonds in our climate of extremes
** Extract from 'Powers of Thirteen'(1983)

## Quotes about Hollander

* Hollander's poems span the full range of human emotions and must be counted among the most sophisticated productions of the human mind.
** 'A Conversation with John Hollander' Interview(by email) Paul Devlin vol 1, St. John's University Humanities Review April 2003
* Since he (Hollander) is a poet himself..he conveyed a passion for that knowledge as a source of current inspiration.
** Karl Kirchway,' At Yale, lessons in writing and life' NY Times October 15 ,2010