Hyam Plutzik

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Hyam Plutzik (July 13, 1911 – January 8, 1962) was an American poet and educator and is best known for Horatio, a long narrative poem that illustrates the illusiveness of memory through a search for the true identity of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Three of Plutzik’s poetry books, including Horatio, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize,^[1] and his work continues to garner praise from leading scholars and critics. Since Plutzik’s death, several new books related to his life and work have been published, with Forewords written by noted poets and scholars, including Anthony Hecht (1987), David Scott Kastan (2012), Daniel Halpern (2017), Richard Blanco (2021), and Edward Hirsch (2023). In May 2012, The Paris Review published a feature article on Plutzik: “A Great Stag – Broad Antlered: Rediscovering Hyam Plutzik.”

During his lifetime, Plutzik published poems in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Sewanee Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry-New York, Hopkins Review, Epoch, Furioso, Prairie Schooner, Yale Review, American Scholar, Antioch Review, New World Writing, The Nation, Saturday Review, Voices, Transatlantic Review, Christian Science Monitor, and Kenyon Review.^[2]

According to the Academy of American Poets: "Plutzik’s work examines nature and the paradoxes of time, the relationship between poetry and science, and delves into questions of Jewish history and identity. In his report for the 1960 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, juror Alfred Kreymbourg said of Plutzik, who was a finalist for his book Horatio: "While he is not a musical poet like most of his contemporaries, he more than compensates by the strength and depth of his writing and the power of his visions and personality."^[3]

Born in Brooklyn in 1911, Hyam Plutzik was the son of Belarusian immigrants Samuel and Sadie Plutzik.^[1] He spent his early childhood with his family on a farm in Southbury, Connecticut. Plutzik did not learn English until he started school, held at a local one-room schoolhouse, at the age of 7,^[2] as his family spoke Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew at home. In 1923, when he was 12, Plutzik moved to Bristol, Connecticut, where his father led a synagogue and community school.

An avid reader, Plutzik graduated from high school in 1928 and attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, on a Holland Scholarship. While at Trinity, Plutzik studied closely with Professor Odell Shepard, a Pulitzer-winning biographer. He also pursued his literary passions as an editor for the student newspaper, the Trinity Tripod, and associate editor of the school’s literary magazine, The Trinity Tablet. The Tablet eventually published one of the writer’s early short stories, “The Golus,” as well as a collection of his poems (“Three Paintings”).^[3]

In 1932, Plutzik graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Trinity and received a two-year fellowship to study literature at Yale University.^[4] In 1933, he won the Yale Poetry Prize for “The Three” (and would win the prize again seven years later for ‘Death at The Purple Rim”)^[5]. Yet, Plutzik left Yale after two years, his degree unfinished. He noted in a letter to his mentor that discomfort with the discipline of academic life was a motivating factor in his decision.

Inspired by his mentor Odell Shepard, Plutzik returned to the Connecticut countryside to seek a “Thoreauvian” lifestyle. During his time there, he wrote “My Sister,” a tribute to a younger sibling who had died at age four. While in Connecticut, Plutzik also wrote “Death at the Purple Rim,” another narrative poem exploring the ethical issues around nonviolence. Prominent critic Mark Van Doren described the latter poem as “strangely and clearly powerful,” writing that he had “read nothing better in a long while, and nothing [he was] likelier to remember.”  Plutzik later won the Yale Poetry Prize^[6] for “Death at The Purple Rim” (in 1941).

Plutzik moved back to Brooklyn in 1934, working as a feature writer and secretary to the editor-in-chief of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.^[7] However, his break from academia was short-lived, as Plutzik returned to Yale in 1940 to complete his master’s degree with a thesis on Thomas Carlyle and Walt Whitman. In 1954, Plutzik would again return to Yale, this time on a Ford Foundation grant to study the relationship between poetry, science, and philosophy.

While he completed his oral exams, he did not submit a dissertation to receive the Doctorate. In 1941, over six months, he composed a 72-page letter to his mentor Odell Shepherd about his personal and intellectual growth since leaving Trinity. The letter was discovered in the Odell Shepard Archive at Trinity and published by the Watkinson Library in 2015, titled Letter From a Young Poet; it was described as “a song of the self and the soul” by Daniel Halpern, who wrote the foreword to the book.^[8]

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Plutzik enlisted in the Army Air Corps, serving as a drill sergeant and first lieutenant. Stationed at various bases throughout the American South, he became keenly aware of the impact of segregation. This experience inspired such poems as “To Abraham Lincoln, That He Walk By Day” and “The Road.”

In 1944, he became an ordnance and education officer for the Eighth Army. He was stationed in Norfolk, England, and participated in support activities for the D-Day invasion.^[9] He would later publish several poems that grew out of his military experience, including “On the Airfield at Shipdham,” “The Airman Who Flew Over Shakespeare’s England,” and “The Old War.” Plutzik also began drafting his long poem Horatio during this period.

Returning to civilian life, Plutzik became an instructor in the English department at the University of Rochester. He spent 16 years (1946–62) teaching at the University of Rochester and served as Deane Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry from 1961 until his death the following year.^[10] As a teacher, Plutzik created a solid foundation for poetry in the English department at the University of Rochester and Upstate New York, where he remained for the rest of his professional life.

Upon Plutzik’s death, the University of Rochester established the Plutzik Poetry Series—which has welcomed more than 300 readers—to celebrate his contributions to the school, the field of poetry, and his commitment to the continuous improvement of the craft.^[11]

Hyam Plutzik died of melanoma at the age of 50 on January 8, 1962, in Rochester.^[12] He was survived by his wife, Tanya Roth Plutzik, and their four children: Roberta, Alan, Jonathan, and Deborah. As of 2024, Tanya is still living at the age of 104.

^[1] The New York Times, 29 July 1956, p64: https://www.nytimes.com/1956/07/29/archives/samuel-plutzik-69-rabbi-and-educator.html

^[2] BOA Editions: https://www.boaeditions.org/collections/hyam-plutzik

^[3] Trinity College archives: https://commons.trincoll.edu/watkinson/category/college-archives/page/3/

^[4] The New York Times, May 23, 1941, p. 16

^[5] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/05/08/a-great-stag-broad-antlered-rediscovering-hyam-plutzig/#:~:text=Plutzik%20twice%20won%20Yale's%20highest,Death%20at%20the%20Purple%20Rim.%E2%80%9D

^[6] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/hyam-plutzik/aspects-of-proteus/

^[7] Hyam Plutzik Archive, University of Rochester, Box 5: https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/finding-aids/D113, and https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-brooklyn-daily-eagle-hyam-plutzik-2/6657173/  

^[8] Trinity College Tripod:  https://trinitytripod.com/arts/plutziks-progress-watkinson-publishes-lost-letter/

^[9] Norfolk Tales, Myths & More: https://norfolktalesmyths.wordpress.com/2018/05/20/hyam-plutzik-comes-to-shipdham/

^[10] Hyam Plutzik Archive, University of Rochester, Bpx 4: https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/finding-aids/D113

^[11] University of Rochester Library: https://rbscpexhibits.lib.rochester.edu/exhibits/show/plutzik/ramsay-1982/prose-poet

^[12] The New York Times, 10 January 1962, p. 47: https://www.nytimes.com/1962/01/10/archives/hyam-plutzik-50-poet-won-awards-rochester-professor-dies-was-former.html

Plutzik submitted his first collection, “House of Gorya and Other Poems,” to Scribner’s in 1945. When Scribner’s turned down the manuscript, Plutzik penned an additional 52 poems and repackaged the work as Aspects of Proteus, published by Harper and Brothers in 1949  His 1952 story, “Outcasts of Venus,” was published under the pseudonym of Anaximander Powell in Two Complete Science-Adventure Books, a pulp magazine. He also wrote a long speculative poem, “Mythos,” about a group of astronauts journeying through space. In 1959, Wesleyan University Press published Plutzik’s second collection, Apples from Shinar (reprinted in 2011 to mark Plutzik’s centennial).

In 1960, Plutzik wrote a plan for his future works, outlining the literary projects he hoped to bring to fruition in the coming years. These proposed works included a play in verse on the fall of Athens in the Peloponnesian wars. He also planned to create a long poem on the Holocaust, which was to include a section on Anne Frank and another on Lapichi, his ancestral hometown in Belarus.

Horatio, published in 1961, is perhaps the most notable of the poet’s work. Inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Plutzik’s Horatio centers on the search for truth. The work focuses on Horatio’s efforts to “tell aright” the story of his friend, the Danish prince. Sections of Horatio had previously been published in magazines and Plutzik’s second collection, Apples from Shinar.

Horatio was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry that year, with jurors Stanley Kunitz and Louis Untermeyer calling the poem “a fascinating puzzle.” Their notes go on to say Horatio is “primarily a tour de force[, … and] ingenious in its kaleidoscopic shifts from melodrama to metaphysics, from straightforward narrative to involved nightmare.”

Despite losing out to W. D. Snodgrass for the Pulitzer in 1962, Horatio’s reputation as a great work remains. In the 2011 Foreword to the Centennial edition of Plutzik’s Apple from Shinar,  Yale scholar David Scott Kastan called Horatio “one of the genuinely original and important American long poems.”

Plutzik garnered recognition for his talent well before releasing a full collection. During his time as a student, Plutzik won numerous prizes for his work. Of note, he was twice awarded Yale’s Albert Stanburrough Cook prize: for “The Three” (1933) and “Death at The Purple Rim” (1941).

By the early 1960s, notable writers like Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Thom Gunn were already among Plutzik’s early admirers. Plath first published Plutzik’s work in England in 1961 in the Critical Quarterly Poetry Supplement. In 1963, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn brought more of Plutzik's work to British readers. The pair included 16 of Plutzik’s poems in their 1963 anthology, Five American Poets (Faber and Faber), alongside the work of Edgar Bowers, Howard Nemerov, Louis Simpson, and William Stafford.

When he became UK Poet Laureate in 1984, Ted Hughes revisited the impact of Plutzik’s poetry on his own work, saying Plutzik’s poems had “haunted [him] for 25 years. And they seem even more alive and special now than they did when [he] first found them.” He went on to say that, at Plutzik’s best, his work seems “marvelously achieved, a sacred book.”

Horatio has continued to garner significant global attention. In the 1970s, Joseph Brodsky translated parts of Plutzik’s epic narrative, Horatio, into Russian for a theatrical presentation in the former Soviet Union. In 2014, Author James Shapiro included an excerpt of Horatio in Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now (Library of America), and the New York Journal of Books review called the work “an ambitious poem.”

In 1987, BOA Editions published Plutzik's Collected Poems, edited by Anthony Hecht, who wrote in the introduction that Plutzik’s poems “deserve to be far more widely known and admired than at present they are,” calling him “a poet of such remarkable achievement.” ^[1]

In 1999, the Plutzik Library for Contemporary Writing was dedicated at the University of Rochester, and in 2004, Plutzik was recognized in a campus publication as one of the most outstanding teachers in the University's history.  

In his 2001 book Cold War Poetry: The Social Text in the Fifties Poem, Edward Brunner wrote: “Plutzik’s achievement is stunning,” saying some of his works “go unmatched by any other postwar poetry except that of Langston Hughes or Gwendolyn Brooks.”

A film about Plutzik’s life and work, Hyam Plutzik: American Poet, was released in 2007. Oscar nominee Christine Choy and Ku-Ling Siegel directed it. It featured appearances by prominent American poets such as Hayden Carruth, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Stanley Kunitz, and Grace Schulman. The film was featured at the Jewish Film Festival in Jerusalem in 2007, the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin in 2008, and the Las Vegas Film Festival in 2021.

In 2021, Miami-based publisher Suburbano Ediciones debuted a collection of Plutzik translations with the publication of 32 Poems / 32 Poemas, a bilingual Spanish-English edition (edited by George B. Henson). The fourteen translators reflect a diversity of voices from Spain and the Americas. In addition to Henson, they are Layla Benitez-James, Pablo Brescia, Pablo Cartaya, and Carlos A. Del Valle Cruz. George Franklin, Ximena Gomez, Natalia Molinos, Carlos Pintado, Jonathan Rose, Jorge Vessel, Jose A. Villar-Portela, and Gastón Virkel. The collection includes a foreword by Richard Blanco, the Obama Presidential Inaugural Poet and Miami Dade Poet Laureate.

In 2022, the University of Rochester’s Meliora Press published a commemorative edition of Hyam Plutzik’s never-before-published poem, The Seventh Avenue Express, to mark the 60th anniversary of the series. In the foreword, poet-scholar Edward Hirsch wrote:

“Plutzik was a seeker. He sought moments of mystical insight.[…] The train is moving through tunnels, but the poet is also tunneling into himself. He moves above ground and struggles to surpass his own alienation, to find something stable and permanent inside himself, a bright jewel that will outlast the instability of time. He seeks something indestructible and permanent.” ^[2]

In Fall 2024, Academic Studies Press will publish Hyam Plutzik, American Jewish Poet: Memory, Loss and Time, a collection of essays and poetry (including previously unpublished work) edited by Dr. Victoria Aarons, Dr. Sandor Goodhart, and Dr. Holli Levitsky of the Jewish American and Holocaust Literature Symposium, an affiliate of the American Literature Association. Twenty scholars will contribute to the volume, including Alan Berger, Maxim Shrayer, Sara Horowitz, Phyllis Lassner, Cary Nelson, Monica Osborne, Naomi Sokoloff, Eric Sundquist, and Rodger Kamenetz.

^[1] BOA Editions: https://www.boaeditions.org/collections/hyam-plutzik

^[2] University of Rochester Meliora Press: https://www.rochester.edu/news/meliorapress/

• The Three (Yale University Prize Poem, 1933). New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1933. (Pamphlet)
• Death at the Purple Rim (Yale University Prize Poem, 1941). Brooklyn: The Artisan Press, 1941. 37pp
• Aspects of Proteus, a book of poems. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949. 94pp.
• Apples from Shinar: A book of poems. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959. 59pp.
• Horatio. New York: Atheneum, 1961. 89pp.
• Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems, with a foreword by Anthony Hecht. Brockport, N.Y..: BOA Editions, 1987. 313pp.
• Apples from Shinar: Special Edition, with an afterword by David Scott Kastan. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. 74pp.
• 32 Poems / 32 Poemas. Bilingual (English-Spanish) edition with a foreword by Richard Blanco. Miami: Suburbano Ediciones, 2021.

Plutzik also published poems in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Sewanee Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry-New York, Hopkins Review, Epoch, Furioso, Prairie Schooner, Yale Review, American Scholar, Antioch Review, New World Writing, The Nation, Saturday Review, Voices, Transatlantic Review, the Christian Science Monitor, and Kenyon Review.

• Yale University: Prize Poem (J.S. Cook Award for “The Three”), 1933
• Yale University: Prize Poem (J.S. Cook Award for “The Purple Rim”), 1941
• National Institute of Arts and Letters: Award for accomplishment in lyric and narrative poetry. 1950
• Poetry Awards Prize: for a Book of Verse (subsequently known as the Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards). Shared award with Rolfe Humphries. 1951
• University of Rochester Summer Faculty Fellowship for Creative Writing. 1954
• Ford Foundation Faculty Fellowship for study of science as background to modern poetry 1954–1955.
• University of Rochester Summer Faculty Fellowship for Creative Writing. 1954
• University of Rochester Summer Faculty Fellowship for Creative Writing. 1958
• Lillian Fairchild Award (Rochester) for Best Work of Imagination. 1959
• “Horatio” selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize 1961
• The city of Rochester declares May 11, 2002, Hyam Plutzik Day in recognition of his contributions to the community. “Sprig of Lilac” is noted as the official poem of the Lilac Festival.

• Hyam Plutzik Official Website