Daniel Hoffman

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Daniel Gerard Hoffman (born April 3, 1923) is an American poet, essayist, and academic. He served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress — a position now known as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry — from 1973 to 1974.

Hoffman was born in New York City. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Corps, where he served stateside as a technical writer and on an aeronautical research journal. He was educated at Columbia University, earning an A.B. (1947), an M.A. (1949), and a Ph.D. (1956).

In 1954, Hoffman published his first collection of poetry, An Armada of Thirty Whales. This collection was chosen by W.H. Auden as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Auden commended it in his introduction as "providing a new direction for nature poetry in the post-Wordsworthian world." He has since published ten additional collections of poetry, a memoir, and seven volumes of criticism.

Hoffman has taught at Columbia University, Swarthmore College, and the University of Pennsylvania. He retired from the latter as Felix Schelling Professor of English Emeritus, and its Philomathean Society in 1996 published an anthology of poetry in honor of his efforts to bring contemporary poets to give readings in their halls. He is a chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. From 1988 to 1999, he served as Poet in Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, where he administered the American Poets' Corner.

Awards Hoffman has won include the Hazlett Memorial Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry from The Sewanee Review, the Memorial Medal of the Maygar P.E.N. for his translations of contemporary Hungarian poetry, the 2005 Arthur Rense Poetry Prize "for an exceptional poet" from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and several grants and fellowships, including those from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Hoffman lives with his wife in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

[edit] Published works

An Armada of Thirty Whales (1954)
The Poetry of Stephen Crane (1957)
A Little Geste and Other Poems (1960)
Form and Fable in American Fiction (1961)
The City of Satisfactions (1963)
Barbarous Knowledge: Myth in the Poetry of Yeats, Graves, and Muir (1967)
Striking the Stones (1968)
Broken Laws (1970)
Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1971), nominated for the National Book Award
The Center of Attention (1974)
"Moonlight dries no mittens": Carl Sandburg reconsidered (1979)
Brotherly Love (1981), nominated for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award
Hang-Gliding from Helicon: New and Selected Poems, 1948-1988 (1988), winner of the 1988 Paterson Poetry Prize
Faulkner's Country Matters: Folklore and Fable in Yoknapatawpha (1989)
Words to Create a World: Interviews, Essays, and Reviews on Contemporary Poetry (1993)
Middens of the Tribe (1995)
Zone of the Interior: A Memoir, 1942-1947 (2000)
Darkening Water (2002)
A Play of Mirrors (2002), a translation from the Italian of Ruth Domino's play
Beyond Silence: Selected Shorter Poems, 1948-2003 (2003)