Words to Create a World: Interviews, Essays, and Reviews of Contemporary Poetry

Front Cover
University of Michigan Press, 1993 - 301 pages
Words to Create a World collects interviews, essays, and reviews by distinguished poet, critic, and literary historian Daniel Hoffman. The book begins with the text of his inaugural address as Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress, in which Hoffman examines the stylistic revolution that signaled the birth of modernism. The final essay, "Wings of a Phoenix?", examines the possibilities for poetry in this postmodern era.

Between these are discussions of books by and about founding modernists (Pound, Moore, Sitwell, Frost, Graves, Auden) who do not "succumb to the imitative fallacy and gibber at the window because the house is on fire." Hoffman's historical imagination elucidates the work of many other contemporary American and British poets, including his own. Words to Create a World will appeal to the reader who enjoys poetry and who hopes for guidance over the sprawling terrain of verse in the twentieth century.

About the author (1993)

Daniel Gerard Hoffman (April 3, 1923 to March 30, 2013) was an American poet, essayist, and academic. He was appointed the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1973. Hoffman was born in New York City. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Corps an was stationed stateside as a technical writer and as the editor of an aeronautical research journal. He detailed his experiences in his memoir: Zone of the Interior, 1942-1947. He was educated at Columbia University, where he earned a B.A. (1947), an M.A. (1949), and a Ph.D. (1956). In 1954, Hoffman published his first collection of poetry, An Armada of Thirty Whales. His other works included: Darkening Water, A Play of Mirrors, Beyond Silence: Selected Shorter Poems, 1948-2003, and The Whole Nine Yards: Longer Poems. Hoffman died in an assisted living facility in Haverford, Pennsylvania on March 30, 2013. He was 89.

Bibliographic information

TitleWords to Create a World: Interviews, Essays, and Reviews of Contemporary Poetry
Poets on poetry
AuthorDaniel Hoffman
Editionillustrated
PublisherUniversity of Michigan Press, 1993
ISBN047206505X, 9780472065059
Length301 pages
  
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