The title [of Hoffman's selected poems]—Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba—is appropriate in at least two ways. With its reference to Napoleon's enforced residence on Elba, the old palindrome suggests the principal theme of Hoffman's work—exile from "another country," one that he has known as though in a dream and to which he will one day return triumphantly. As for the fact that the title can be read both ways, Hoffman's work … not only can but should be read both in chronological and in anti-chronological order.

"Now why," asks Daniel Hoffman, "would a visitation from the Isles/Of the Blessed come to Swarthmore, Pa. 19081, a borough zoned/For single-family occupancy? No/Rocks of Renunciation on our/Assessors' rolls" ("A Visitation," Striking the Stones). These lines are typical of Hoffman's poetic product in a number of ways. The tone is conversational, the language colloquial. The mild wry humor co-exists naturally with a subject he takes very seriously indeed. Social satire is not his primary medium, but the jab at suburban complacency—the poet's own complacency—in the lines quoted typifies the habitual and endearing self-deprecation of this genuinely modest poet.

The experience so unpretentiously presented in "A Visitation" takes place as night gives way to dawn. This transitional hour, together with the time of gathering dusk, consistently provides the impulse for Hoffman's poems: the passing of dream into the waking day, and of the day back into dream again. As is likely to be true with all good poets, night, dream, death, the imagination and the possibility of rebirth are closely associated in Hoffman's mind. (p. 2)

Trees have a mantic role in Hoffman's poems; and, curiously, they are often sexual in what one might think of as an un-arboreal way: 'Between the thighs of trees old graves of sorrows/Open." But, also in connection with the trees, "a fresh wind stirs." Thus "A Visitation" ends on a positive note, though this note is well qualified by the evocation of death and deadliness that is inseparable from the old day's demise and from the prospects of the dawning sky, that "black widow," now about to take "her new lover," the rising sun.

Returning to the matter-of-fact specificity of Hoffman's opening, a visitation from the Isles of the Blesséd did, after all, occur for the poet very early on the morning in question in Swarthmore, Pa. 19081. Hoffman, you will remember, begins his poem by asking why. It is perhaps obvious that there is no answer to that question. One can say, however, that Hoffman has reported such visitations throughout his career of twenty years and more as a publishing poet. They are, I would infer, the most important experiences in his life, the lifeblood of his poems. Hoffman, who knows his limitations as well as he does his powers, does not make the mistake of trying to describe the visitation itself, here or elsewhere in his poems. All he gives us is "Somewhere,/A consecrated shore/Ringed by dolmens where the wind speaks." That may or may not evoke the Isles of the Blesséd for a given reader. If he wishes to find such a world described in detail, he must turn to another poet. What Hoffman gives us, in many of his poems, is not a guided tour of the Elysian Fields, but the longing of an exile to return there.

[A] sense of being exiled from another life has, from the beginning, been the keynote of Hoffman's poetry…. (p. 3)

[Hoffman's] ear for the sounds and rhythms of his own lines has always been as acute as his discriminating response to the corresponding phenomena in the natural world. In fact, his mastery of words, like every other aspect of his art, has undergone a striking refinement with the years, to excellent effect. One does not need to seek far in An Armada and A Little Geste to find him playing with sounds in a way that suggests the exuberance of an incompletely mastered talent. From "In a Cold Climate":… "Who would encumber/these huckleberryfields' sparse opulence with tropics'/richesse?"; and, from "The Everlasting,"… "where the smith's sparks gonged in the deep shed's shade." Syntactically, there are snarls that rival Browning at his worst…. ["In the Beginning"] is one of Hoffman's best early poems. The subject is the magical use of language, observed in the poet's daughter Kate, who stands on the jetty and cries "Boat! Boat!," even when none is visible to the physical eye. Hoffman handles the incident with the warmth of feeling that will illuminate many of his more mature poems about imagination and the word…. But the poem suffers from a radical uncertainty of rhythmic effect. Its movement vacillates between that of actual speech, which is Hoffman's future métier ("Her passion/to name the nameless pulls her/from the syllabic sea/of incommunicate loneliness"), repetitive iambs ("the world without description/is vast and wild as death," and jouncing trisyllables ("But that makes no difference to Katy,/atingle with vision and word"). As a result, the little girl's excitement does not make itself adequately felt in the over-all tone of the poem.

For contrast, we can now usefully refer to the sounds, syntax and rhythms of a typical late poem from The Center of Attention, "The Wanderer":

             This body that has fastened
             Itself to the wanderer
 
             Who hastens with mysterious
             Balked purposes,
 
             These hands that answer,
             This face that turns
 
             At the calling
             Of the name
 
             That I am wearing
             Like one shoe
 
             —How did I come
             In all this gear
 
             Among so few
             Clues to where I've come from
 
             Or where
             I am to go?

The syntax is crystal clear. The rhythm, which falls into no regular pattern, exactly reflects what is going on in the poet's head: a meditative examination of his problematic identity. Almost all of the important words in the poem (for example—fastened, face, few; body, balked; gear, go) are linked with others by alliteration, but always unobtrusively. The end rhymes are mostly slant and off-beat, producing an effect of order or continuity that remains elusive (wanderer, answer, gear, where; name, come, from; shoe, few, go). And the brief stanzas are all linked by inconspicuous assonance (fastened, hastens; purposes, turns; face, name; name, am; wearing, gear; gear, where; clues, go). All of this, in support of the poem's mood and theme, is the mark of the master craftsman. And Hoffman does it again and again, in poem after poem. (pp. 5-6)

A substantial number of Hoffman's poems deal with the big questions of his trade: What is the poet's purpose in writing, and How does a poem succeed in communicating what he wishes to say? Poems on these subjects can be tedious—mere shop talk or a kind of narcissism. On the other hand, such poems are always justified when the poet is not just taking you through his workshop but is pointing out that his problem as poet is everyman's problem: that of staying alive imaginatively and establishing the possibility of meaningful communication between the inner man (his emotions, his imaginative vision) and the world outside himself. Hoffman's poems about poetry are of this kind.

From various early poems by Hoffman, one gets the impression of an earnest, idealistic young man who tries to believe that the voice of the bard will collar passers-by and impose enlightenment upon them…. This is surely a sentiment that invites dissent. But time passes, with its attrition. Hoffman is not about to give up his faith in the imagination, but he finds that the spawn of unreason and power require that faculty, "great with rage," to

        Turn … and conceive
        On days like dragons' teeth.

to

        Retell, in the leaping of exultant breath,
        In the blood that sighs,
        What knowledge in the bone this side of death
        Death makes us prize.
         ("Reading the Times,"—The City of Satisfactions)

Hoffman's tone has again altered by the time that he faces "A New Notebook" in the last poem of Broken Laws. Here the emphasis is not on mantic authority nor on rage and imaginative frenzy but on redemptive vision and power analogous to that of love. He hopes to "incise" upon the empty pages "images/the soul has seized/out of confusion…."… The case has altered once again in The Center of Attention, where the emphasis falls on waiting time out, paying attention, having patience: "What awaits us we/Can know only/By our deliverance" ("East"). Finally, in the last poem of the same volume ("The Poem"), Hoffman conceives of his art as itself an exile seeking deliverance. It remains faithful in adversity, and, with luck, may just have strength to deliver its message to the well-disposed reader…. (pp. 6-8)

It is apparent that Hoffman, from the beginning, has been blessed—or burdened—by a social conscience. He has written good poems against war, injustice, moral decay, destruction of the world's environment, the threat of computerized nonentity. Surely there have been few Phi Beta Kappa poems as humorous, eloquent and dignified as the one he delivered at Swarthmore College ("The Peaceable Kingdom" …) in 1964. After surveying the world's ills for the assembled youth who were about to be graduated into them, he asks, "are we ready to go forth?" If so, he sensibly advises, take with you "lists/of those Important Books as yet unread … and explications/of … the vertebrates/who, since the Good Duke dreamed a green world where the court/corrupts no man, agree upon hypotheses/that define the Good and tell the False from True."… There speaks Hoffman the humanist, man of literature and guide and guardian of youth.

But that is not, I think, where Hoffman really lives. In his poem "In Memory of Lewis Corey,"… a former teacher whose message was reform, "It's fifteen years he's dead now," Hoffman reflects,

                   yet the thought
  Of Corey makes my mind rehearse
  All that he taught,
  And this thought chides—
  How little else have I reformed, besides
  The diction of my verse;
  Should the commonwealth, like art, seek perfect forms
  What can it learn from my self-searching trade?

What, indeed! Hoffman knows the answer better than almost anyone. In "Filling the Forms,"… he has his fun with a registrar who complains, "You've not filled in the subject of your course!"—

  My pencil lead turns golden, prints my calling:
  Donnez un sens plus pur aux mots—scratch that—
  REDEMPTION OF THIS GENERATION'S JARGON
  In conventional signs a Registrar can read.

Redemption of language from jargon is, of course, truly the subject taught by every English Professor, especially if he is a poet, and, above all, if he is Daniel Hoffman. Still more importantly, the purification of language is not only exemplified by Hoffman's poems but is also one of their most significant subject.

Every poet must sometimes wish that he could communicate without words. Hoffman … often finds birdsong at the center of his days. It is a language that seems to him more perfect than any he can marshal…. It is, however, characteristic of Hoffman's stance as exile from a more perfect world, a more perfect self, that he consistently represents himself as being unable properly to understand and communicate in the language of that world or self. The resultant frustration is, I believe, the source of a gentle but deep and persistent weltchmerz that contributes its notes to almost everything he writes. (p. 10)

Hoffman celebrates love in all of its aspects, from the physical through the intellectual to the spiritual. Like Yeats and Graves, whom he admires, he takes the Muse seriously and responds most readily, as poet, to the feminine sphere of existence (the Muse, growing things, the creatures of nature, night, water, the moon). His harshest criticism is reserved for such male-associated phenomena as war, intellectual pride, and, as mentioned above, the sun as emblem of egotism and the indifferent exercise of power. Although he has produced generous tributes to such fellow artists as Yeats, Williams, and Ives, he seldom celebrates male power. The notable exception is "'The Great Horse Strode Without a Rider.'" But even here the wonderful horse's destination is the sea into which he plunges. I cannot remember any poem in which Hoffman satirizes a woman or any womanly quality. On the other hand, his heroines abound. He gives us Maid Marian, [two portraits of Aphrodite, Thomas the Rhymer's dark lady, the Queen of Hearts, and the Muse herself]…. (pp. 12-13)

Hoffman's two most recent volumes, and, in particular, The Center of Attention, display a new emphasis by the mature poet on things that are mortal and, paradoxically, therefore permanent—what he calls "elementals."… The longing for an elusive world whose "vivid light" is "pure/Energy" ("This Life") persists, but it is increasingly balanced by an acute awareness of those natural phenomena that share with the poet what is mortal in himself…. The Center of Attention is full of poems that make such discoveries. The poet finds his own indestructible energy embodied in the elements ("Wind," "Fire," "Waves"), the points of the compass ("North," "East," "South," "West"), and sundry creatures ("Shrew," "Boar," "Dogfish"). The new emphasis, combined with an every-growing mastery of verse technique, permits a condensation so radical that some of the poems approach the absolute silence invoked in "A Gift of Tongues." (p. 14)

In an analogous way, Hoffman has found new, objective ways of communicating his frustration with the inadequacy of language, however finely honed, as a bridge between the inner conception and the poem, the poem and the reader. The would-be suicide in the title poem of The Center of Attention communicates with the crowd below him, and they with him, only so long as his life hangs in the balance and he therefore provides a diversion from the day's routine. The great Polish translator in "The Translators' Party" enjoys a few moments, among poets whose language is not his own, of warm reminiscence with Auden, but one reads in the Times soon afterward that "he was found/'Apparently fallen'/From his high window,/That voice/Stilled now/On New York's alien ground." And the poet's ex-student, in "The Princess Casamassima," had listened to all that her teacher had to say in class and had then gone forth into the world possessed with the belief that there is meaning in blowing up buildings with dynamite.

Like most poets, Hoffman has been, and remains, dedicated to the faith that the best human qualities are incalculably precious, tending toward the divine. By the same token, he has staunchly attacked phenomena that seem to him to have a dehumanizing effect. Such phenomena are epitomized, for him, by the spread into every human activity of computer technology. The common belief that the heroes of our time are the technicians of space flight and those who operate their machines has appeared to him a dangerous illusion. (pp. 15-16)

When I first read The Center of Attention my admiration was tempered by disappointment. It seemed to me that Hoffman's technical skill had made still further strides, while in point of tone and subject he had drawn closer to the rather dreary guilt- and angst-ridden outlook that has become too familiar to us in contemporary poetry and fiction. I now see that I was wrong. Hoffman's work has never been disfigured either by excessive egotism or by self-indulgent postures of despair. The Center of Attention represents, for Hoffman, a growth toward greater objectivity, a more inclusive realism. If some of his poems have been derivative (as what poet's are not?), they are mainly to be found in earlier volumes, not in this one. As I suggested in speaking of the earlier poems, they are valuable mainly as precursors of more fully realized work that followed them. Conversely, the most recent poems can best be read and can most fully be appreciated as the culmination of thought, feelings, visions, aspirations that the poet has long lived with and often before shaped into verse, but never before with such astonishing and beautiful success….

To be sure, there has never been anything mean about Daniel Hoffman or about the poems he has given us. But every good person and good poet should be allowed his divine discontent. May the angelic Hoffman step from his split shell the just image of all he could wish to be, and may the exile live forever in the country of his choice. (p. 18)

John Alexander Allen, "Another Country: The Poetry of Daniel Hoffman," in The Hollins Critic (copyright 1978 by Hollins College), October, 1978, pp. 1-18.