Few do melancholy as well as Rufus does it. Interesting Philip Glass feel to this one.

Born in 1929 in New York, educated at Columbia, John Hollander is a poet and literary critic. He has written more than a dozen books of poetry, and seven books of criticism, including Rhyme’s Reason of which Harold Bloom said: “[it is] on all questions of schemes, patterns, forms, meters, rhymes of poetry in English, the indispensible authority…” and why I was so keen to interview him. According to New York Times, Hollander stresses the importance of hearing poems out loud: “A good poem satisfies the ear. It creates a story or picture that grabs you, informs you and entertains you.”

His honors include the Bollingen Prize, the Levinson Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets he is the current poet laureate of Connecticut, and has taught at many different universities, including Yale.

We met recently at the Philadelphia Book Festival. I spend most of this interview relentlessly and unsuccessfully trying to badger him into identifying, comparing and describing the differences between great and bad poems. To name names. We do get to some of the great (Rosanna Warren, Shakespeare, Browning, Swinburne, Rossetti, for example) but he will not go anywhere near the bad. Toward the end, clearly tired from the day’s activities and my uncalled for bullying, he reads a beautifully funny and thoughtful poem, based on a quote taken from Boswell’s Life of Johnson, found in his most recent collection, A draft of Light.

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Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?- Epicurus

Where knowledge ends, religion begins. Benjamin Disraeli

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. Delos B. McKown

Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions. Blaise Pascal

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. Friedrich Nietzsche

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Karl Marx

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires. Sigmund Freud

A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of "humility." This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism. Albert Einstein

If you gave[Jerry] Falwell an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox. Christopher Hitchens

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. Christopher Hitchens

I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. Ghandi

The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear. Jiddu Krishnamurti

****

All good. Epicurus forgets the importance of free will. Pascal also said that science was a cul-de-sac, a pursuit that dethrones God, elevates man to where he sees himself as Lord of creation which eventually either drives him mad, or demotes him to the merely animal.

Is Shakespeare vanishing?

"…this tragical Titan, who storms the heavens, and threatens to tear the world from off its hinges; who, more terrible than Aeschylus, makes our hair stand on end, and congeals our blood with horror, possessed, at the same time, the insinuating loveliness of the sweetest poetry. He plays with love like a child; and his songs are breathed out like melting sighs. He unites in his genius the utmost elevation and the utmost depth; and the most foreign, and even apparently irreconcileable properties subsist in him peaceably together. The world of spirits and nature have laid all their treasures at his feet. In strength a demi-god, in profundity of view a prophet, in all-seeing wisdom a protecting spirit of a higher order, he lowers himself to mortals, as if unconscious of his superiority: and is as open and unassuming as a child. 

From the Preface to Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays