POET

Daryl Hine (1936 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Formerly the editor of Poetry magazine, Daryl Hine is an accomplished Canadian poet whose classical education permeates his original writing as well as his translations of Homeric verse. Considered a poet's poet with an affinity for structured rhyme and meter, Hine has experimented with villanelles, sestinas, alexandrines, and what Louis Dudek in his Selected Essays and Criticism, calls a variety of "other formal metrical rhyme schemes that he can send spinning into the heights of philosophical outerspace." Though his early verse addresses abstract subjects like history, art, and literature, Hine's more recent poems have become personal in content, exploring such sensitive issues as his unhappy childhood and his emerging homosexuality. Whatever his subject, Hine's poems "have the authority of the maker in firm control of his craft," according to New York Times Book Review contributor Daniel Hoffman.

Technically flawless in the minds of many, Hine's poems nonetheless strike some critics as bloodless and detached. "In Daryl Hine," writes Dudek, "we have an amazingly capable poet for whom poetry is not a mimetic art, whose eye is not in a fine frenzy rolling, who does not overflow with powerful emotion, who does not feed and water the passions, who is not an original, or a legislator, or a man speaking to me ... but a poet from whom poetry is a series of extremely recherche, abstract, contrived word forms, containing oblique and ambiguous philosophical essays and meditations." In his Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950, Richard Howard acknowledges that Hine's approach to verse is controlled, but points out that ideally the ordered form should release rather than suppress emotion. Using that criterion, Howard believes Hine's early books fall short: "We are not aware, in Daryl Hine's first poems, of the nagging presence of anything so extraneous or so impure as 'the real world'—the poet never appeals to it as a means of settling or solving the difficulties of art; for him, the poem is always the statement of itself, a piece of language with which no more can be done and which, if it fails in its own terms, cannot be ransomed or relieved."

Not until the publication of The Wooden Horse, Hine's sixth book of verse, do the poems begin to break out of what New York Review of Books contributor Marius Bewley describes as "their armorial cocoons of meter and syntax." Howard notes that a relaxation of tone "characterizes most of The Wooden Horse, which is to say that it is in closer contact with the disorder of life than the earlier, the younger decorum of wit allowed.... The world, in Hine's first poems, came to a stop but also lit up. Now it is no longer incandescent, but it moves." In his later poems, Hine continues his exploration of the personal, prompting Phoebe Pettingell to suggest in the New Leader that "what has changed is the depth of suffering and vulnerability resonating through much of his output."

Academic Festival Overtures, Hine's 1985 publication, demonstrates his investigation of painful personal themes. Written in alternating rhymed lines of twelve and thirteen syllables, the poem is "autobiography in classical disguise," according to New York Times Book Review contributor Harold Beaver, who describes it as a "virtuoso achievement" and "a remarkable record of a yearning, bookish and inhibited boyhood. Beyond the metrical screen Mr. Hine imposes on his memoirs, he paces to and from—as if watching from behind the self-imposed bars of his caged existence.... [ Academic Festival Overtures ] merges memory and desire, bookishness and smut, with the most dexterous and expert touch."

In and Out, the poet's 1989 work, is a long, narrative poem about Hine's brief flirtation with the Catholic church following the failure of a college love affair (the young man left Hine for a woman). While he eventually realizes that his sexuality cannot be subsumed or avoided by committing himself to the church, the work provides the occasion for a series of meditations on sexuality and spirituality. Writing in Chicago Tribune, Larry Kart calls it a "very readable book ... at once supple and prickly, bitchy and cute," and Richard Ryan calls it "stylish but flawed" in Washington Post, in part because Hine fails to account for or fully explore the reason for his conversion. Written entirely in anapestic meter—which Hine points out "looks like free verse but isn't"—the poem's "prosody offers genuine pleasure" for Ryan, but doesn't dispel his sense that "the elegance dresses up banality." New Republic contributor D. J. Enright, however, finds that "In these confessions, spiritual and sexual, the ebullience and even comicality of the erotic element help to preserve a decency rarely found in literary dealings with the subject, whatever their bias." Enright calls In and Out a "lightly epic poem" and notes that there are moments in which "we enjoy fascinating conversations" between the narrator and the Abbe of a monastery he visits. Genevieve Stuttaford, writing in Publishers Weekly, simply calls the poem "remarkable" and, noting its "narrative pleasures," appraised that work has "the breadth of a novel."

First published in 1990, Postscripts represented Hine's first collection of lyric poems in 13 years. The book received mixed reviews from both Louis McKee in Library Journal and Jim Elledge in Booklist. While Elledge calls Hine's work "urbane, witty, even scholarly," he finds that it often seems too emotionally distanced from its subject matter. Elledge complained that the poems often serve as "a showplace for Hine's intellect" as opposed to conveying any kind of emotional attachment or incident. McKee's Booklist review notes that while at times the poems flow "majestically," they also intimate far too much attention to detail and the mechanics of form. McKee concludes that Hine's fixation with the technical side of his writing reduces these poems to "mere wordplay."

Despite intermittent complaints regarding his dedication to form—such as McKee's—many critics consider Hine a forerunner in contemporary poetry. His work is praised for both perpetuating conventional styles and exploring new territory. Commenting on Hine's development as a poet, the New Leader's Pettingell concludes, "Daryl Hine made a strong beginning as a poet, but ... he has traveled far. Today he is one of the most powerful voices addressing the human condition."

CAREER

Poet, novelist, translator, playwright. Assistant professor of English, University of Chicago, 1967-69, visiting professor, 1978.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

Five Poems, Emblem Books, 1955.
The Carnal and the Crane, Contact Press, 1957.
The Devil's Picture Book, Abelard, 1960.
Heroics: Five Poems, Grosswiller (France), 1961.
The Wooden Horse, Atheneum, 1965.
Minutes, Atheneum, 1968.
Resident Alien, Atheneum, 1975.
In and Out, privately printed, 1975, revised edition, 1989.
Daylight Saving, Atheneum, 1978.
Selected Poems, Oxford University Press (Toronto), 1980, Atheneum, 1981.
Academic Festival Overtures, Atheneum, 1985.
In and Out: A Confessional Poem, Knopf, 1989.
Postscripts, Random House, 1990, Knopf (New York, NY), 1991.

Also author of the poetry collection Arrondissements, 1988.

PLAYS

A Mutual Flame (radio play), BBC, 1961.
The Death of Seneca, produced in Chicago, 1968.
Alcestis (radio play), BBC, 1972.

TRANSLATOR

The Homeric Hymns and the Battle of the Frogs and Mice, Atheneum, 1972.
(And author of commentary) Theocritus: Idylls and Epigrams, Atheneum, 1982.
Ovid's Heroines: A Verse Translation of the Heroides, Yale University Press, 1991.
Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of The Greek Anthology, Princeton University Press, 2001.

OTHER

The Prince of Darkness & Co. (novel), Abelard-Schuman, 1961.
Polish Subtitles: Impressions from a Journey (nonfiction), Abelard-Schuman, 1962.
(Editor with Joseph Parisi) The "Poetry" Anthology, 1912-1977, Houghton, 1978.

Contributor of poems to the New Yorker and other magazines. Editor, Poetry, 1968-78.