R.I.P. John Hollander

The American poet John Hollander has died , leaving a rich legacy of poetry and criticism behind him. Micah Mattix offers a heartfelt tribute to the man and his work in today’s On the Square :

While his work is preoccupied with identity and reality, poetry for Hollander can never fully “grasp” either the self or the world “outside” the self. In this respect, he has followed Stevens, suggesting that the point of poetry (as opposed to science) is to contemplate the meaning of the world even if the meaning “propounded” (to borrow Stevens’s terminology) is always fictitious because of its temporal or partial expression.

Read the rest here . You can also view some selections of Hollander’s poetry over at Poets.org and The Poetry Foundation . Here’s a poem to start with: ” The Mad Potter .”