Books

The Three (Yale University Cook Prize Poem, 1933). New Haven: 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.; reprinted by Wesleyan in centennial edition, with an afterword by David Scott Kastan,  2011.

Horatio. New York: Atheneum, 1961. 89pp.

Hyam Plutzik: The Collected Poems, with a foreword by Anthony Hecht. Brockport, NY: BOA Editions, 1987. 313pp.

Letter from a Young Poet. Hartford: Watkinson Library at Trinity College, 2016. Foreword by Daniel Halpern. 110pp.

 


Poems in Periodicals

“Critique”, in Poets’ Column, New York Times Sunday Book Review, April 3, 1949 (Reprinted from Aspects of Proteus)

“The King of Aĩ”, New York Times Book Review, April 10, 1949

“Divisibility”, New York Times Book Review, April, 1949

“To Those Who Look Out”, New York Times Book Review, June 19, 1949

“The Milkman”, “The Last Fisherman”, Sewanee Review, July-Sept., 1950

“To My Daughter”, Beloit Poetry Journal, Spring 1951 (Rochester Review, Jan. 1960)

“Two Hearts and an Arrow”, Poetry-New York, II, 1950

“The Zero That is All”, “Because the Red Osier Dogwood”, Hopkins Review, Summer, 1951

“A Philosopher on a Mountain in Scythia”, “Value the Intermediate Splendor of Birds”, “The Priest Ekranath”, Epoch, Spring, 1952

“Genesis is Recurrent”, Furioso, Summer, 1952

“When I see Many Hills”, Prairie Schooner, Spring, 1952

“The Dance of the Triple Phoenix”, Prairie Schooner, Fall, 1952

“Paint This World if You Can”, Prairie Schooner, Winter, 1952

“Man and Tree”, The Yale Review, Summer, 1952

“The Road”, “Entry from the Account Book of the Last Romantic”, Prairie Schooner, Summer, 1953

“For T.S.E. Only”, American Scholar, Spring, 1955

“Of Objects Considered as Fortresses in a Baleful Space”; “Beware, Saunterer”; “In the 51st Year of That Century…”; “The Bass”; The Yale Review, Summer 1955 (“The Bass” was reprinted in New York Herald-Tribune, June 26, 1955; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 10, 1955)

“Beware, Saunterer, of this Desperado, a Mr. Bones, A Bad Actor”, The Yale Review, Summer, 1955

“And in the Fifty-First Year of the Century…”, The Yale Review, Summer, 1955

“Requiem for Edward Carrigh”, Antioch Review, Winter, 1955-56

“Jim Desterland”, New World Writing, Winter, 1956

“To the Painter Paul Klee”, The Nation, March 1, 1958

“A New Explanation of the Quietude and Talkativeness of Trees”, Saturday Review, October 4, 1958

“Consolations”, The Nation, December 20, 1958

“On the Airfield at Shipdham”, “The Belated Birds”, Voices, May-August, 1959

“The Shepherd”, (part VI of Horatio), Transatlantic Review, Summer, 1959

“On Some Birds of Svetozar Radekovitch”, “As the Great Horse Rots on the Hill, Homage to James Agee”, Furioso, Summer 1959

“Winter Never Mind Where”, Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 31, 1959 (Reprinted from Apples from Shinar)

“The Dream About Our Master, William Shakespeare”, Accent, Summer, 1959

“Carlus”, (from Horatio), The Yale Review, December, 1960

“Time and the Poem”, “The Lecture”, “On the Last Survivor”, “The Marriage”, Poetry, December 1960

“Concerning the Painting”, The Nation, April 22, 1961

“Next Time I Shall Not Burn the Beehive”, Kenyon Review, 1961


Poems In Anthologies

Fifteen Modern American Poets, ed. George P. Elliott. Rinehart, 1956:

  • “An Equation”

  • “The Begetting of Cain”

  • “On the Photograph of a Man I Never Saw”

  • “He Inspects His Armory”

  • “Divisibility”

  • “Mr. Pollington Remembers a Poet”

  • “Argumentum ad Hominem”

  • “Identity”

  • “My Sister”

  • “Exhortation to the Artists”

  • “For T.S.E. Only”

  • “The Road”

  • “Portrait”

  • “The Ostler” (“Horatio,” Part II)

  • “Faustus” (“Horatio,” Part III)

Quarto of Modern Literature, New Revised Edition, Brown & Perrin. Scribners, 1957:

  • “An Equation”

  • “The Begetting of Cain”


American Poetry Now: a selection of the best poems by modern American writers, ed. Sylvia Plath. Critical Quarterly Poetry Supplement, no. 2, 1961:

  • “Attilio Semelle"

Five American Poets, ed. Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. Faber and Faber, 1963:

  • “As the Great Horse Rots on the Hill”

  • “Jim Desterland”

  • “After Looking into a Book Belonging to my Great Grandfather, Eli Eliakim Plutzik”

  • “The Mythos of Samuel Huntsman”

  • “The Bass”

  • “The Zero that is All, Man and Tree”

  • “And in the 51st Year of that Century…”

  • “Of Objects Considered as Fortresses in a Baleful Space”

  • “Trio for Two Voices and A Woodwind”

  • “The Milkman”

  • “The King of Ai”

  • “Abner Bellow”

  • “The Chinaman and the Florentine”

  • “Dostoevski, Proust, and the Others”

  • “George Hobbs”

  • “Patterns of Earth”

Breakthrough – A Treasury of Contemporary American Jewish Literature, ed. Irving Malin, Irwin Stack. McGraw Hill, 1963:

  • “Portrait”

  • “The Priest Ekranath”

The Beginnings in Poetry, ed. William J. Martz, Scott Foresman & Co., 1965:

  • “To My Daughter”

  • “The Geese”

Poetry, An Introduction and Anthology, ed. Charles Filver and Martin Nurmi. Charles Merill Books, Inc., 1967:

  • “An Equation”

Reading Literature, Stories, Plays and Poems, ed. Joseph Satin, 1968:

  • “Mr. Pollington Remembers a Poet”

Decade, ed. Norman Holmes Pearson. Wesleyan University Press, 1969:

  • “To My Daughter”

  • “As the Great Horse Rots on the Hill”

  • “Jim Desterland”

  • “The Geese”

  • “The Importance of Poetry, or the Coming Forth of Eternity Into Time”

The Voice That is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, ed. Hayden Carruth. Bantam Books Inc., 1970:

  • “I am Disquieted When I See Many Hills”

  • “Jim Desterland”

  • “Of Objects Considered as Fortresses in a Baleful Place”

Poems on Poetry, The Mirrors Garland, Robert Wallace and James to A FFE (ed) E.P Dutton, Inc. (pub):

  • “The Importance of Poetry, or the Coming Forth of Eternity Into Time”

A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, ed. Oscar Williams. Chas. Scribners and Sons, 1970:

  • “The King of Aĩ”

  • “The Mythos of Samuel Huntsman”

The Ghetto Reader, ed. David P. Dermaret and Lois S. Lamdin. Random House, 1970:

  • “Portrait”

Questions of Rhetoric and Usage, ed. Kenneth S. Rothwell. Little Brown & Co. Publisher, 1971:

  • “Absurd Cycle”

Poems for Pleasure. Doubleday:

  • “The Airman”

Twelve American Poets, ed, Geo Arms, etc. The MacMillan. Co.:

  • “For T.S.E. Only”

All Those Voices, The Minority Experience, ed. Charlotte I. Greenspan and Lester M. Hirsch, 1971 The Macmillan Co., 1971:

  • “For T. S. E. Only”

  • “Portrait”

Hero’s Way-Contemporary Poetry in the Mythic Tradition, ed, John Alexander Allen. Prentice Hall, 1971:

Voices within the Ark-The Modern Jewish Poets, ed. Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf. Avon Publishers, 1980:

  • “The King of Ai”

  • “The Begetting of Cain”

  • “On the Photograph of a Man I Never Saw”

The Rattle Bag, ed. by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. Faber and Faber, 1982:

Apocalyptic Messianism and Contemporary Jewish-American Poetry, ed. by Barbara Gitenstein. State University of New York Press, 1986:

  • “For T.S.E. Only”

God Prefers Everything, ed. by Joseph Brodsky. Moscow, 1992.

  • “The Ostler” and “Faustus” from Horatio

The Wesleyan Tradition: Four Decades of American Poetry, ed. by Michael Collier. Wesleyan University Press, 1993:

  • “Jim Desterland”

  • “The Premonition”

American Poetry, The Twentieth Century Vol. Two The Library of America. Robert Hass, John Hollander, Carolyn Kizer, N. Mackey, Marjories Perloff, Advisory Board, 2001:

  • “The Airman who Flew Over Shakespeare’s England”

  • “Winter, Never Mind Where”

  • “For T.S.E. Only”

  • “As the Great Horse Rots on the Hill”

America’s Favorite Poems, ed. Robert Pinsky and Maggie Diets. W.W. Norton and Co, 2000..

  • “Cancer and Nova”

Cold War Poetry, ed. Edward Brunner. University of Illinois Press, 2001

  • “And in the 51st Year of the Century…”

  • “To My Daughter”

  • “Horatio” (excerpt)

Water Voyages, ed. Joan & John Bigby. Oyster Bay, NY, 2010:

  • “The Last Fisherman”

Urezi, Anthology of War Poetry, ed. Tomica Bajsić. Zagreb. Croatia, 2010:

  • “And in the 51st Year of That Century…” (Croatian translation)

What Poetry Means to Business, by Clare Morgan with Kirsten Lange and Ted Buswick. University of Michigan Press, 2010:

  • “Jim Desterland”

Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Nowled. James Shapiro, with foreword by President Bill Clinton. Library of America, 2014:

  • “Carlus” excerpt from “Horatio”

Literary Connecticut: The Hartford Wits, Mark Twain and the New Millennium. by Eric D. Lehman and Amy Nawrocki. The History Press, 2014:

Indexes for Jewish, Biblical, and Ancient Near Eastern Literature, 2016:

  • “The Begetting of Cain”

Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion, published by the Academy of American Poets, 2015:

  • "On Hearing That My Poems Were Being Studied in a Distant Place"


Essays, Stories, and Dramatic Works

“If Grammatical Slip Shows, Don’t Worry About It; English Profs Are Human”, Rochester Review, May 1956

“Creativity in Poetry”, Rochester Review, Jan./Feb., 1961

Critical Essay: “Theodore Roethke: The Journey to the Gold Stone.” Unpublished

Critical Essay: “W.H. Auden and the Einsteinian Awareness.” Unpublished

Tickletoby, a story for children, 25 MS pages, with songs. Unpublished

Jemmy, a story for children, 41 MS pages. Unpublished

Scoon, Nutney and Shake Well, a collection of 26 humorous sonnets, including“The Duck Stories” (3) for children. Unpublished

A Fellow of Infinite Jest, Short play. 23 pages. Unpublished

Mosaic on a Skull of Sir Thomas Browne. 43 pages. Unpublished

The Thirteen Locksmiths, a comedy. 155 pages. Unpublished

 


Musical Compositions

 Diversify the Abyss by Wayne Barlow

  • “Instructions to an Architect”

 

Canto V by Samuel Adler

  • “The Importance of Poetry or the Coming Forth of Eternity Into Time”

  • “If Causality is Impossible, Genesis is Recurrent”

 

An Equation by Roger Briggs

 

An Equation: Two Poems of Hyam Plutzik by Jeffery L. Briggs 

  • “An Equation"

  • “Jim Desterland”

 

Sprig of Lilac by Robert Cohen

  • “Sprig of Lilac”

 

Of Eternity as a Closed System by Robert Cohen

  • “Elegy”

  • “The Uneasy Hedonist”

  • “Connecticut Autumn”

  • “The Milkman”

  • “Shoeless Joe Jackson”

  • “The Premonition”

  • “Of Eternity Considered as a Closed System”


References to the Poet and his Poems

In The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, ed. Ian Hamilton, 1994

In The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English, ed. Ian Hamilton and Jeremy Noel-Tod, 2013

In "The Step of Iron Feet: Formal Movements in American World War II Poetry" by Rachel Lynn Edford, PhD dissertation, University of Oregon, 2011.

In Breakthrough – A Treasury of Contemporary American Jewish Literature, ed. Irving Malin, Irwin Sack. McGraw Hill, 1963

In Norfolk at War: Wings of Friendship, by Frank Meeres. Amberley Publishing, 2014

"Hyam Plutzik Comes to Shipdham" In Norfolk Tales and Myths, 2018

"The Poisoned Gift: Wu Weishan's Statue of Marx in Trier" in The American Spectator, May 3, 2018

"Writing the Jewish Rust Belt" in Prosen People, blog of the Jewish Book Council, April 16, 2018


Awards

Yale University: Prize Poem (J.S. Cook Award for “The Three”), 1933

Yale University: Prize Poem (J.S. Cook Award for “Death at the Purple Rim”), 1941

National Institute of Arts and Letters: Award for accomplishment in lyric and narrative poetry. 1950

Aspects of Proteus selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize 1961

Poetry Awards Prize: for a Book of Verse (now known as Borestone Award).

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

Apples from Shinar selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize 1960

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.

 

Books  |  Poems in Periodicals  | Poems in Anthologies  |  In Manuscripts  |  Awards