Interview with Daniel Hoffman
By J.F. Pirro
Daniel Hoffman, the former U.S. Poet Laureate and the Felix Schelling professor of English Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, lives in Swarthmore — but he remains a national treasure. At 85, what he and his late wife, Elizabeth McFarland, the poetry editor at The Ladies’ Home Journal from 1948-1961, have collectively, as a couple, done for American poetry may be unparalleled. After his recent publication of her posthumous collection Over the Summer Water: Poems by Elizabeth McFarland (Orchises Press, 64 p., $14.95), for which Hoffman wrote the preface, as a courtesy to The Mad Poets Society he took time to visit and correspond with Philadelphia-area writer J.F. Pirro to discuss both his and his wife’s careers, his inspirations and ongoing contributions.
JFP: What did your wife of 57 years do for the institution of poetry in this country?
DH: Elizabeth McFarland was Poetry Editor of Scholastic (1945-48) and The Ladies’ Home Journal (1948-61). I still hear from poets she discovered and encouraged, whose first poems she published. At LHJ, she was hired to attract real poets and real poems, and this she did, publishing work, among others, by W.H. Auden. Marianne Moore, Richard Eberhart, Theodore Roethke, Mark Van Doren, Walter De la Mare as well as new work by up-and-coming then-young poets such as Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, John Ciardi, Randall Jarrell and John Updike. What’s more, she persuaded the editor-in-chief (Bruce Gould) to raise the payment for poems from $1 to $10 a line.
JFP: What have you done for the institution of poetry?
DH: Everything in my power to help keep it alive, first by trying to write as well as I can, and then, principally through my teaching writing seminars at the University of
Pennsylvania. Each year I taught one or two small groups of eight or 10 student writers I’d chosen. To qualify they had to show some talent with the language and be readers of poets in the canon, whether traditional or modern. A teacher can’t be responsible for the students’ talent, but can, at best, introduce them to the resources of the language and the art, and guide them to avoid making mistakes in the composition of their own poems.
JFP: Were the seminars the genesis of any talent?
DH: I’ve just received, from the 27th of my former students to have published, his new book. My alums include winners of national prizes. Two of the last three winners of the New Criterion prize are Geoffrey Brock and J. Allyn Rosser. I do pride myself in that none of these talented younger poets has tried to imitate me. My duty was to help each find his or her own voice, not mimic mine.
JFP: Is poetry having a revival? Does it need one? Or deserve one?
DH: I hope there will be people interested in poetry for years to come. I hope that the IPODs and video games won’t dominate too much of the attention of the young. I saw hope as a judge of Poetry Out Loud last October at the Governor’s Mansion for dozens of kids from around the state devoted to memorizing and reciting poems. There’s hope.
JFP: Any thoughts on how poetry should be taught to the young?
DH: Poetry should not be presented as a code to be deciphered or a puzzle to be cracked. The love of poetry has to start with the pleasure principle. T.S. Eliot once said, “One can appreciate a poem before it is understood.”
JFP: Whose career are you more proud of — your own or Liz’s?
DH: In the 1940s and ‘50s, she wrote romantic lyrics filled with resonant language, work that went against the grain of metaphysical and of flat-lining verse confessional poems, the two movements then dominating the zeitgeist and the literary quarterlies. Yet, in the past year, I’ve placed her poems in Poetry, The Hudson and Sewanee Reviews. Then I brought out her much-praised book, Over the Summer Water. Her poems have already been chosen for several online anthologies. The time has come for acknowledging poetic virtues ignored in the 1950s and ‘60s.
JFP: How and where did you discover the windfall of Liz’s unpublished work?
DH: They were in one of her folders (in their Swarthmore attic), not mine. I didn’t intrude on her things, but when she died, I was curious. Now, it’s too bad she’s not here to enjoy publication and recognition.
JFP: How did you know publishing Liz’s work was the right thing to do?
DH: I just realized that these poems were really good. I tried them out on a couple of poet friends and was encouraged. I’ve received many letters as reinforcement that it was the right thing to do.
JFP: How difficult was it to sort through Liz’s hidden work?
DH: It was both an assuagement and an intensification of grief. It’s made me relive our past. We were a great help to each other because we understood one another and the requirements of writing: We knew when to leave one another alone. As long as I last, I think I’ll be among the walking wounded. I don’t think I’ll ever stop missing her.
JFP: What about the diversity of your own work? You taught, you wrote literary criticism. How did the diversity help or hurt your poetry?
DH: The work wanted to be varied. When you’re writing, you’re half in and half out (of the process). When you start a poem, you don’t know where it will end. Or, if you begin with the end, you don’t know where it will begin.
JFP: What have been the effects of your teaching and your critical writing on your poetry?
DH: My critical writing always concerned poets and novelists whose work I found challenging and inspiring. I was fortunate in being able to teach primarily those poets and novelists. I could give an entire semester’s seminar reading the complete oeuvre of Poe, or the plays as well as the poems of Yeats, and seminars on Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and Faulkner, about all of whom I’ve written books. What I’ve learned from the masters must have indirectly influenced my own writing.
JFP: What is your reputation, or lack thereof, as a major 20th century poet. Did you seek fame? Are you bothered it didn’t find you? Or did it?
DH: My reputation? That’s for others to determine. As for fame, any poet who seeks it truckles to the moment’s popular taste and feeds on adulation, but such a poet is a traitor to his art. A poet’s obligation is to write as well as he can, according to his own deeply-held convictions, regardless of the movements and fads of the moment.
JFP: Movements and fads?
DH: I’ve been writing and publishing for some 60 years, and have seen poetic fashions come and go, fads that made some of their followers momentarily famous. There was the well-made, ironic, metaphysical poem, and the reactions against that, the Beats, Black
Mountain poets, the breath-line poets, deep-image poets, confessional poets, L-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poets. In each movement gangs of followers would review and inflate one another’s work. They’d start out as rebels against the poetic and societal establishments, but soon ended up with tenured professorships just like the poets their manifestoes attacked.
JFP: Where did you fit in?
DH: I joined none of these groups. I was never a member of any school of poetry, or any literary clique. I was no disciple of any movement. When confessional poetry was all the rage, I didn’t write any; I’ve always been on the outside of most in the ‘poetry biz,’ as they say. My work was often a lonely enterprise.JFP: During the height of the confessional movement, didn’t you actually write a book-length meditation on American history, Brotherly Love, which takes as its executive metaphor William Penn’s treaty with the Indians?
DH: What moved me was my reaction, during the Vietnam war, to the betrayal of Penn’s and the Constitution’s idealism by the faux-Quaker Nixon and a corrupt government. Tous ca change … This was a far cry from what then-famous poets were writing about — parental tyranny, sexual abuse, drug trips and thoughts of suicide. My theme was equally personal, though with quite a different focus.
JFP: Even as an octogenarian you seem to still have so much to say. What’s on the immediate horizon for you?
DH: Another collection is due this coming January, The Whole Nine Yards, of narrative poems and suites (poems grouped by theme). Also in the works is Shards, a collection of 50 little poems of less than 10 lines, another memoir, a collection of essays on poets and translations of Hungarian poetry that I’ve labored over for more than a quarter century.
JFP: Lots of critics have described your work. You’re a critic, too. How do you describe it or rate it?
DH: I have simply derived inspiration from living. Poetry is what comes up in the mind, and the mind is an over-stocked filing cabinet — with many files out of order. It’s simply what comes to consciousness.
JFP: Do we secretly root for our artists and writers to become masters as they age and cure? Is their best work in their later years? Is your own work better now than before?
DH: Wouldn’t that be grand? As we all age, our work ripens… True for Picasso, for Yeats, for Williams, for Stevens, but not so true for Wordsworth and other poets who in their later work nearly wrote themselves out of their reputations. There’s the danger of self-repetition, as well as of declining mental and emotional resilience. But there’s also the possibility of development in ways different from the poet’s earlier work, as we see in Auden.
JFP: And your later and ongoing work?
DH: In writing poems, one is always an apprentice. Each new poem, if it’s going to be any good, is an exploration of feelings, subject, theme and language untrodden before. I’m just now trying to deal with a theme new to my own work, grief. Is my recent work better than it was before? I can but hope it’s different from what I’d written earlier, and good enough to survive.
