Brotherly Love - Softcover

Hoffman, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0394747267 ISBN 13: 9780394747262

Publisher: Vintage Books, 1981

"Brotherly Love" is a long poem that evokes William Penn's luminous vision of America, and shows what has become of it as the intractable conflicts of our history - struggles over the land, keeping faith with the Indians, the uses and abuses of power - threaten Penn's ideal. "A beautiful and important book which has the makings of being a great popular success, and of becoming a staple in our schools and a permanent landmark in our culture...The use of historical documents is brilliant...The moral problems presented are inextricably involved in our history as a nation, and still confront us. The Indian material is beautiful and poignant almost beyond belief. And the vision of Penn is noble and significant." - Frederick Morgan "A spectacular achievement which handles brilliantly the mysterious relationship between spirit and flesh, history and vision, intent and act, dream and reality." - Anthony Hecht

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About the Author:

Author of eight other books of poetry, Daniel Hoffman has published several critical studies, of which the best known may be Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, also a finalist for the National Book Award. Hoffman taught for ten years at Swarthmore College and then, for twenty-seven, at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Poet in Residence and Felix E. Schelling Professor of English Emeritus. From 1988 to 1999, he served as Poet in Residence of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City and administered the American Poets' Corner. In 2004 he received the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the seventeenth poet so recognized by The Sewanee Review, America's oldest literary quarterly.

Review:

"A beautiful and important book which has the markings of … a landmark in our culture."—Frederick Morgan

"I have never before seen such a connection between the historical and the imaginative, nor have I encountered in many a long day such a strong and pertinent lyricism within a larger dramatic compass."—James Dickey

"A spectacular achievement which handles brilliantly the mysterious relationship between spirit and flesh, history and vision, intent and act, dream and reality."—Anthony Hecht

"Though grounded firmly in historical fact, [Brotherly Love] is very original in conception and quite effectively expresses the dreams and despairs of those who lived this history as well as our own contemporary need to understand the past as 'we clatter down the rigid rails' into the future."—Library Journal

"Hoffman's Brotherly Love is his finest work, itself a trope of the city whose history it makes myth of, and redeems, urbanizing the wilderness of history and its fables. A grand poem in the American grain."—John Hollander

"An astonishing feat of historical and literary imagination."—Monroe K. Spears, Washington Post

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