Critical Essay by Louis L. Martz
Hollander has written his Reflections on Espionage in the form of a single long poem composed in strict eleven-syllable lines, except for twenty-one lines at the very...
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Critical Essay by Phoebe Pettingell
One of the most urbane poets writing, [Hollander's] mercurial mind sparkles with the iridescence of an opal. In the notes to [Blue Wine], he engagingly expl...
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Critical Essay by Alicia Ostriker
Hollander's tastes are eclectic, which enables him to write cogently [in Vision and Resonance] on poets as disparate as Donne, Jonson and Campion, Marvell, Mi...
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Critical Essay by James K. Robinson
John Hollander began his poetical career with A Crackling of Thorns (1958) which, on Auden's recommendation, was the choice of the Yale Younger Poets series...
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Critical Essay by Michael Wood
[Cleverness] is not a vice, indeed I regard it as something of a virtue, and in John Hollander's poems it is the clearest sign of his extraordinary gift. Spectra...
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Critical Essay by Harold Bloom
It is exactly 20 years since the appearance of John Hollander's first book of poems. I read the book then, soon after I first met the poet, and was rather more i...
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Critical Essay by Richard Poirier
"Spectral Emanations," the extraordinarily brilliant and ambitious work in poetry and prose which leads off [the collection by the same title], is prom...
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Critical Essay by Andrew Motion
[Blue Wine] describes a wide range of experience in confidently rhetorical terms, and seldom seems more than swaggering or pompous. To [Hollander's] credit, he ...
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Critical Essay by Richmond Lattimore
John Hollander does not become easier as he goes, nor does the somewhat frustrated pleasure of reading him grow less. He is always on the point of being fully com...
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Critical Essay by Paul Ramsey
[The prose poems of Hollander's In Place] are not so much lyric, though light and shadow pass and interplay, as about what constitutes or fails to constitute lyri...
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