Brotherly Love

Daniel Hoffman

University of Pennsylvania Press Pennsylvania Paperbacks

192 Pages, 6.12 x 9.25 in, 4 illus.

Paperback
9780812217360
Published: March 2000

$24.95

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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.

Daniel Hoffman began writing Brotherly Love while he was Poet Laureate of the United States, in 1973-74 (the appointment then called Consultant in Poetry of the Library of Congress). Widely hailed, the book was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. It is adapted as the libretto for Ezra Laderman's music in the oratorio Brotherly Love, premiered by the Philadelphia Singers in March 2000.

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.

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

"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

"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

"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

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