Daniel G. Hoffman

Daniel G. Hoffman, 89 Daniel G. Hoffman, 89, the poet and literary critic, died on March 30, 2013 at the Quadrangle in Haverford, PA. He had lived in Swarthmore for 55 years. The cause of death was heart failure. Hoffman served in 1973-74 in the post now known as Poet Laureate of the United States. His first book of verse, An Armada of Thirty Whales, was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale series of Younger Poets Award in 1954. Among its dozen successor volumes were Brotherly Love, a finalist for the National Book Award' and four books of collected poems, Hang-Gliding from Helicon (1988), Beyond Silence (2003), Makes you Stop and Think Sonnets (2005) and his longer poems in The Whole Nine Yards (2009). His Next to Last Words appeared in 2013. Among his awards are the Anse Prize as "an exceptional poet" from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Aiken-Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry (from the Sewance Review) and the Memorial Medal of the Magyar P.E.N. for his many translations of contemporary Hungarian poets. The son of the late Daniel Hoffman, a financial adviser, and Frances Beck, he was born in New York N.Y. and grew up in Larchmont. He entered Columbia as a pre-engineering student in 1940. A summer job in 1941 as editorial assistant in Jordanoff Aviation, a firm providing instructional manuals for the Army Air Force, led to his assignment, when called up in the Enlisted Reserve. , to HQ Air Material Command at Wright Field, Ohio, on the staff of the Technical Data Digest. This journal provided abstracts of current literature relevant to the AAF Research and Development Program. After Officer Candidate School he was assigned again to Wright Field, this time as Officer in charge of the magazine. He recruited a staff of forty civilian aeronautical engineers and scientists to abstract significant articles fro nearly 100 publications worldwide. The Technical Data Digest was sent to American air bases around the world, to Air Force contractors, to Allied air attachments and to civilian scientists engaged in research for the AAF. It's circulation reached 8500 copies. With the wars end Congress stopped funding the magazine. Hoffman was discharged as a First Lieutenant in 1946 and received the Legion of Merit Medal. He returned to finish his Junior Year at Columbia now majoring in English. He did his graduate work there. In 1948 he married Elizabeth McFarland then the Poetry Editor of Scholastic Magazine, later of The Ladies Home Journal, where she published Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Richard Eberhart, Theodore Roethke and many other eminent poets. Hoffmans masters thesis on Paul Bunyan, winner of the University of Chicago Folklore Prize for 1949, was published in 1952. The first of his four studies analyzing the literary uses of themes from folklore and mythology. His The Poetry of Stephen Crane (1956) was awarded Columbia's Ansley Prize as the best humanities dissertation of the year. Over half a century later both theses are still in print. In 1975 he joined the English faculty of Swarthmore College' after 10 years he went to the University of Pennsylvania and in 1993 retired as the Felix E. Schelling Professor of English Emeritus. The Philomathean Society, a student organization, published The Philomathean Anthology of Poetry in his honor, presenting work by the eighty poets Hoffman had brought to the campus. Over 40 Alumni of his poetry writing seminars have published books, many winning prizes. His further publications include the much-anthologized study, Form and Fable in American Fiction, and his best known book, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, a finalist for both the national Book Award and the National Book Critics Prize. In 1981 he published the poem Brotherly Love, a book length meditation and dramatization of William Penn as a founding father of American Democracy, also a finalist for the National Book Award. This work he adapted as the Libretto for Ezra Laderman's oratorio of the same title, premiered by The Philadelphia Singers in 2000. From 1988 to 1999 he was poet in Residence of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, with the help of a board of distinguished writers administering the American Poets Corner. Since 1974 he served on the Council of the Authors Guild and was one of the three plaintiffs in the Guilds 2005 suit against Google for copyright infringement; he was long a director of the Authors League Fund, which aids indigent writers. He was a member of the Century Association and, in Philadelphia, had the longest continuous membership since 1952, in the Franklin Inn Club. For over 50 years Hoffman spent summers on Cape Rosier, Harborside, Maine, the site of many of his poems. His wife predeceased him in 2005. Survivors: His son, MacFarlane, of Swarthmore, and his daughter Kate H. Siddiqi of Philadelphia. A memorial service: will be held in the Swarthmore Friends Meeting in the Fall. Interment: on Cape Rosier will be private. Arrangements: J. Nelson Rigby. Online condolences: Jnelsonrigbyfh.com