HONIG, Edwin

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Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 3 September 1919. Education: Attended public schools in New York; University of Wisconsin, Madison, B.A. 1941, M.A. 1947. Military Service: U.S. Army, 1943–46. Family: Married 1) Charlotte Gilchrist in 1940 (died 1963); 2) Margot S. Dennes in 1963 (divorced 1978); two sons. Career: Library assistant, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 1941–42; instructor in English, Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana, 1942–43, New York University and Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 1946–47, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 1947–49, and Claremont College, California, summer 1949; instructor, 1949–52, and Briggs Copeland Assistant Professor 1952–57, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Associate professor, 1957–60, professor of English, 1960–83, professor of comparative literature, 1962–83, and since 1983 professor emeritus, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Visiting professor, University of California, Davis, 1964–65; Mellon Professor, Boston University, 1977. Poetry editor, New Mexico Quarterly, Albuquerque, 1948–52. Director, Rhode Island Poetry in the Schools Program, 1968–72. Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1948, 1962; Saturday Review prize, 1957; New England Poetry Club Golden Rose, 1961; Bollingen grant, for translation, 1962; American Academy grant, 1966; Amy Lowell traveling fellowship, 1968; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1975, 1977; National Endowment for the Arts/P.E.N. fiction project award, 1983; Poetry Society of America translation award, 1984; Columbia University Translation Center award, 1985. Decoration by the President of Portugal: Knight of the Military Order of Saint James of the Sword, 1987. Decoration by King Juan Carlos of Spain: Knight of the Cross of Isabel the Catholic, 1996. Address: Box 1852, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

The Moral Circus. Baltimore, Contemporary Poetry, 1955.

The Gazabos: Forty-One Poems. New York, Clarke and Way 1959; augmented edition, as The Gazabos: Forty-One Poems, and The Widow, 1961.

Poems for Charlotte. Privately printed, 1963.

Survivals. New York, October House, 1965.

Spring Journal. Providence, Rhode Island, Hellcoal Press, 1968.

Spring Journal: Poems. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1968.

Four Springs. Chicago, Swallow Press, 1972.

Shake a Spear with Me, John Berryman: New Poems (includes the play Orpheus Below). Providence, Rhode Island, Copper Beech Press, 1974; augmented edition, as The Affinities of Orpheus,1976.

At Sixes. Providence, Rhode Island, Burning Deck, 1974.

Selected Poems 1955–1976. Dallas, Center for Writers Press, 1979.

Interrupted Praise: New and Selected Poems. Metuchen, New Jersey, Scarecrow Press, 1983.

Gifts of Light. Isla Vista, California, Turkey Press, 1983.

The Imminence of Love: Poems 1962–1992. Dallas, Texas Center for Writers Press, 1993.

Plays

The Widow (produced Chicago, 1953). Included in The Gazabos, 1961.

The Phantom Lady, translation of a play by Calderón (produced Washington, D.C., 1965). Included in Calderón: Four Plays, 1961.

Calderón: Four Plays, translations by Honig. New York, Hill and Wang, 1961.

Cervantes: Eight Interludes, translations by Honig. New York, New American Library, 1964.

Calisto and Melibea (produced Stanford, California, 1966). Providence, Rhode Island, Hellcoal Press, 1972; opera version (produced Davis, California, 1979).

Life Is a Dream, translation of a play by Calderón (broadcast BBC London, 1970; produced Providence, Rhode Island, 1971). New York, Hill and Wang, 1970.

Ends of the World and Other Plays. Providence, Rhode Island, Copper Beech Press, 1983.

Radio Play: Life Is a Dream, 1970 (UK).

Other

García Lorca. New York, New Directions, 1944; London, Editions Poetry London, 1945; revised edition, New Directions 1963; London, Cape, 1968; New York, Octagon, 1980.

Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory. Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1959; London, Faber, 1960; New York, Oxford University Press, 1966; Providence Rhode Island, Brown University Press, 1973.

Calderón and the Seizures of Honor. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1972.

The Foibles and Fables of an Abstract Man. Providence, Rhode Island, Copper Beech Press, 1979.

The Poet's Other Voice: Conversations on Literary Translation. Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1985.

Editor, with Oscar Williams, The Mentor Book of Major American Poets. New York, New American Library, 1961.

Editor, with Oscar Williams, The Major Metaphysical Poets. New York, Washington Square Press, 1968.

Editor, Spenser. New York, Dell, 1968.

Editor and Translator, with Susan M. Brown, The Poems of Fernando Pessoa. New York, Ecco Press, 1986.

Editor and Translator, Always Astonished, by Fernando Pessoa. San Francisco, City Lights, 1988.

Translator, The Cave of Salamanca, by Cervantes. Boston, Chrysalis, 1960.

Translator, Four Plays, by Pedro Calderón. New York, Hill and Wang, 1961.

Translator, Eight Interludes, by Cervantes. New York, New American Library, 1964.

Translator, Life Is a Dream, by Pedro Calderón. New York, Hill and Wang, 1970.

Translator, Selected Poems of Fernando Pessoa. Chicago, Swallow Press, 1971.

Translator, Divan and Other Writings, by García Lorca. Providence, Rhode Island, Bonewhistle Press, 1974.

Translator, with A.S. Trueblood, La Dorotea, by Lope de Vega. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1985.

Translator, with S.M. Brown, The Keeper of Sheep, by Fernando Pessoa. Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York, Sheep Meadow Press, 1986.

Translator, The Unending Lightning: Selected Poems of Miguel Hernàndez. New York, Sheep Meadow Press, 1990.

Translator, Four Puppet Plays; Diván Poems and Other Poems; Prose Poems and Dramatic Pieces; Play without a Title, by Federico García Lorca. Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York, Sheep Meadow Press, 1990.

Translator, Calderón de la Barca: Six Plays. New York, Fordham University Press, 1993.

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Bibliography: In Books and Articles by Members of the Department: A Bibliography by George K. Anderson, Providence, Rhode Island, Brown University Department of English, 1967.

Manuscript Collection: John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

Critical Studies: "The Voice of Edwin Honig" by John Hawkes, in Voices (Vinalhaven, Maine), January-April 1961; "To Seize Truth Assault Dogmas" by Robert Taylor, in Providence Sunday Journal (Rhode Island), 4 March 1962; "'"Spring' Breakthrough in the New Poetry" by James Schevill, in San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle, 5 January 1969; "Double Exposure" by L. Alan Goldstein, in The Nation (New York), 19 May 1969; interviews with H.J. Cargas, in Webster Review (Webster Groves, Missouri), fall 1977, and with Richard Jackson, in Poetry Miscellany 8 (Chattanooga), 1978; in American Poets since World War II edited by Donald J. Greiner, Detroit, Gale, 1980; "Through the Aftermath: Mythical Transformation in the Poetry of Edwin Honig" by Barbara L. Estrin, in Salmagundi (Saratoga Springs, New York), 52–53, spring-summer 1981; A Glass of Green Tea-with Honig edited by Susan Brown, Thomas Epstein, and Henry Gould, Providence, Rhode Island, Alephoe, 1994.

Edwin Honig comments:

Matters that may have influenced my becoming a writer (though perhaps this is only a nice rationalization) were an early sense of exclusion owing to my being blamed for my younger brother's accidental death when I was five and a severe, nearly fatal bout with nephritis when I was nine. A positive influence was my illiterate grandmother who spoke Spanish, Arabic, and Yiddish (but no English); I lived with her and my grandfather for a few years after my parents were divorced when I was twelve. Experiences of this sort urged certain necessities upon me: one was to write instead of choking; another, to make sense of the world around me, but sense that would not exclude my own fantasy. Both my poetry and my criticism seem to rise out of such a mixed need: the criticism that creates—Spain (Calderòn and García Lorca) as well as allegory—and the poetry that criticizes persons and places I have loved and distrusted—the "moral circuses" where the "gazabos" live.

My best poems are either unfinished or still merely notes in a notebook. Some poems got away (were printed) but have since been excluded from my books because they did not seem substantial enough or true. In the same way I quarrel constantly with the poems written by contemporaries old and young. No poet writing in English in the last sixty years has mastered his art or has resisted the nervous need to keep changing his style, and so none has been able to write as a complete human being. Perhaps Rilke and Lorca succeeded in a few poems. (I find, now that I have written the penultimate sentence, that I am echoing an opinion of Gottfried Benn.) I have taken to translating and to writing plays out of impatience with poetry and criticism, but I go on writing poetry—to stop would be a self-betrayal.

(1974)(This was written in 1966 and might just as well stand for what I feel today, though I think the statement bleaker than need be. There are probably more than two poets, for instance, who have done a service to the language or their language in the last sixty years, and I am almost willing to admit that Pound is one.)

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Edwin Honig points out that some literary critics, idealizing a golden age of the near or distant past, "speak and write about the poetry of the past 150 years like a keeper fleaing an underbred dog that is only half the dog its sire was." Not only does Honig disagree with that critical judgment, but he has also made his own substantial contribution to the healthy state of contemporary American poetry through his work as poet, teacher, critic, anthologist, translator, and playwright. Like the modernist poetry of a previous generation, much of Honig's poetry makes rigorous demands on the reader and thus has to find its own audience gradually—limited in size but appreciative of the depth, range, and skill they discover in the poems. It is a poetry of careful craftsmanship, breadth, learning, sharp perceptions, and deep, authentic feeling.

In the earlier volumes, obviously influenced by Eliot and the prevailing standards of modernism, the feeling is often, though not always, insulated by technical virtuosity and layers of erudition. For a time Honig moved away from the poem as carefully constructed artifact to a looser, though by no means formless, open-ended poem (Four Springs). The new form did not diminish any of his technique or learning, nor did it suddenly transform him into a poet easily accessible to the casual reader, but it did more readily release depths of personal emotion: "One wants to tell /how the memory rushes hungrily back to the remembered /life of the dead /beloved, until at a touch, of themselves, the episodes /rush on unreeling, /speed up beyond one's grasping; imagined again, /retelling themselves, /great hunks of life that plead again to be real!"

A headnote to Four Springs, observing that "in 1966 or so I began writing a poem that very soon went beyond my conception of when or where it would end" and that the book's three concluding sections "continue the story to the present date, my fiftieth birthday," gave some evidence of an intention to explore further potentiality in this new form. Later volumes, however, are reminiscent of Honig's earlier style, with a strong added interest in myth. With the conviction that, "though we can't live without myths, we find it hard to re-define and adapt them to our experience," Honig has, in The Affinities of Orpheus, dramatically reworded the Orpheus-Eurydice myth and has also included two sections of poems that develop further the significant experiences, emotions, and issues raised by the myth.

Honig's critical study of García Lorca calls attention to "his problematical forcing of the door of the constant enemy, death." The comment sheds as much light on Honig himself as it does on García Lorca. His book titles (Survivals, Spring Journal, Four Springs, Gifts of Light)—and indeed the poet's work as a whole—affirm life, but the affirmation is wrested, often fiercely and explicitly, from the omnipresent threat of death: "Death with its cup of hopefulness /needs nourishment /but won't be fed by leftovers— /tired grief, /bewilderment of life's exhaust." Honig is a fine exemplar of his own concept of the function of the poet, "that voice which celebrates the difficult, joyous, imaginative process by which the individual man discovers and enacts his selfhood."

—Rudolph L. Nelson