(William) Daryl Hine Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on (William) Daryl Hine

When "a bee for beauty boomed behind the grove" in Daryl Hine's first small book of poems, it might have been buzzing with the poet's own enthusiasm. Certainly Hine is the most elegant artificer among contemporary Canadian poets, yet most readers and critics find the beauty booms so loudly that they can detect little experience or meaning beyond. So Hine has remained in Canada, if not largely in his adopted United States, a poet treated with awe but with little interest.

Hine, the son of Robert Fraser and Elsie James Hine, was born in 1936 in New Westminster, British Columbia. His early life is remembered in In and Out (1975), a privately printed confessional novel in verse, as friendless and boring--until he discovered Latin. His most recent book, Academic Festival Overtures (1985), expands on this earlier autobiographical work, seeming to fuse the intimate detail of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu with the metrical meditations of Wordsworth's Prelude in a twelve-part anti-epic account of Hine's British Columbia youth and especially of the experiences and discoveries of his thirteenth year.

At age eighteen Hine had Five Poems (1955) published and began to study at McGill. Before he graduated with a B.A. in classics in 1958, The Carnal and the Crane (1957) had appeared in the McGill Poetry Series, edited by Louis Dudek. The book is dedicated to Jay Macpherson, a poet whose austere technical brilliance and mythic echoes he shares. Northrop Frye discussed the mythic allusions of The Carnal and the Crane in a 1957 issue of University of Toronto Quarterly, noting the "inequalities" of Hine's expression but forecasting much: "I doubt if any Canadian poet has potentially greater talents than Mr. Hine."

After graduation Hine spent four years in Europe, living mainly in France. During a short trip to Poland in the fall of 1961 Hine worked editing English subtitles for a Polish film. His impressions, recorded in the punningly named Polish Subtitles (1962), are memorable for the slightly acerbic generalizations: "Poland is adorned by the jewels that she does not wear." "Places have this power." Hine writes near the end of the book, "more than persons or events, to focus our feelings and nebulous thoughts; it is a property of places to be haunted."

The poems of this period, published in The Devil's Picture Book (1961), are, however, strikingly and peculiarly placeless. There is neither identifiable location, nor person, nor event: "harmonious ambiguities in a swarm / burrow at the fulcrum of his speech." There is a slight loosening to simpler forms here and there--the repetitions in "The Black Swan," the short stanzas in "Under the Hill"--yet intricate rhyme and dense allusiveness rule. Clever allusiveness also rules in Hine's solitary novel, The Prince of Darkness & Co. (1961); "the novel he wrote about Robert Graves," Richard Howard complains in Alone with America (1980), "cuts much too close to biography to be satire, and the whine of harpies' wings drowns out the laughs." It is a very talky, cerebral novel in which Hine, characteristically, often seems--in the charm of Phillip Sparrow's "spiritual obliquity" or in the aphorism "symmetry was the innermost secret of his art"--to be wittily describing himself.

In 1962 Hine returned to the United States and worked briefly in New York as a free-lance poetry editor. Soon he moved to the University of Chicago where he studied for an M.A. (1965) and Ph.D. (1967) in comparative literature (his doctoral dissertation was on the Latin poetry of George Buchanan, the sixteenth-century Scottish humanist). He became editor of the prestigious Poetry in 1968 and continued there for a decade. The return to North America and his subsequent teaching at several universities (principally the University of Chicago) coincide with a further, slight relaxing of Hine's commitment to pre-Romantic poetic forms. The Wooden Horse (1965) combines the tours de force of wit and prosody with an anecdotal note. The blend is particularly evident in "Plain Fare," whose narrative, described in a subtitle as "Night thoughts on crossing the continent by bus," is occasionally almost documentary: "Sometime before dawn another stop, for breakfast--/ Country ham / And eggs."

Minutes (1968) continues the trend with travelogue poems that seemed absent from his earlier works. The fascinating poem "Terminal Conversation" clearly roots its metaphysical speculations in identifiable experience "in a great railway station/after midnight." Several of these poems-- "Lovers of the River," "Among Islands," "Point Grey,"--return for their setting to the Canadian west coast where Hine was born.

The title of Hine's next collection of poems, Resident Alien (1975), which so cleverly summarizes the poet's stance and reputation, comes from the almost chatty "A B.C. Diary," an occasional poem in rhymed couplets written for a friend's wedding. "Later," he notes wryly, "confronted by the paradox of free / verse, I trade my meaning for a rhyme." Whatever the loosening of Hine's verse in the 1970s (and in Resident Alien his linguistic play is much more likely to begin with the poetry of the cliché and the colloquial), the witty formalist remains in the foreground, rhyme before meaning. "Hine's stylistic predicament in the world of poetry," noted Barry Cameron in a 1976 review for Canadian Literature , "is also one of being a resident alien.... His need to distance life through his art ... is even more urgent here than in the earlier poems."

In Daylight Saving (1978) the erudition is again more balanced by the commonplace. But, as John Fuller, reviewing this volume for the Times Literary Supplement, shrewdly observed, "his commonest device is to bring the world of the senses and the world of grammar into metaphorical conjunction." This typical device puts the emphasis on relationships among words rather than on feelings; the reader is likely to shelve the poems under esoterica. Hine himself provides one persuasive context for modifying this classification in Theocritus: Idylls and Epigrams (1982), which, in addition to the entertaining combination of gossipy tone and sensory extravagance in the poet's translations, provides in the introduction and in the long letter to Theocritus which is the book's epilogue an extended apologia for his own poetics. Hine makes an eloquent case for "the first academic poet," whose strengths are "a curious and not always decorous erudition; ostentatious verbal ingenuity ...; a certain detachment or dryness of tone ...; a fondness ... for the gnomic or sententious statement of which the poem is the ostensible if ironic illustration; shameless artifice...; and more than a craftsman's interest in form."

Hine's Theocritus, however, is not widely read. Evidently only a massive change in taste, for which Hine's own Selected Poems (1980) makes one of the few audible arguments, would make Hine other than a resident alien among Canadian poets. George Woodcock's remark in a 1981 review of Selected Poems for Saturday Night is to the point: "For any reader not professionally concerned with the craft of verse, Hine's manner will always seem too detached, his vision of existence too rarefied, and his forms and diction too conservative. Yet no poet can read him and recognize his consummate skill without admiration and even a little envy."