Brunner places Horatio in cultural, literary, and historical contexts of the 1950s, the decade during which Plutzik was writing the poem. He questions “the long-standing view that most postwar writers deliberately chose to disengage themselves from political and historical contexts” by using examples from Apples from Shinar before turning to Horatio. Next he considers Horatio as not only a poetic but a dramatic text, in the context of 1950s verse drama (e.g. the plays of T.S. Eliot). Finally he situates Plutzik in the critical context of Robert Graves’s myth criticism, as a counterpoint to the ascendant New Criticism of the day. The essay closes with a useful analysis of Part II of Horatio, “The Shepherd.” Edward Brunner is a Professor of English at Southern Illinois University.

Hinman’s eulogy to Hyam Plutzik, delivered on February 16, 1962 at Temple B’rith Kodesh in Rochester, New York, is a probing essay on the role of poet as protector and asserter of life, as exercised by Plutzik in the lyric poems of Aspects of Proteus and Apples from Shinar, and in the long poem Horatio. Hinman concludes with a note on the poet’s relationship to eternity, arguing that rather than make eternal the fleeting objects of human experience, the poet “draws them back from eternity, sets the eternal free in an image, so that it may be known.” Robert Hinman was a Professor of English at the University of Rochester with Hyam Plutzik, and also taught at Emory University and the University of Pittsburgh. He died in 2011.

In this essay, Johnson draws a parallel between the poetic crisis at large and Horatio’s crisis with regards to Hamlet’s dying request, that Horatio tell Hamlet’s story in order to defend the prince’s honor. This crisis has to do with the difference between ontological truth on the one hand, which is Horatio’s purported object from the outset; and, on the other hand, representational, fictive, or performative truth, which, Johnson argues, is Hamlet’s true realm of being. Johnson’s discussion of the poetic crisis in Plutzik’s work centers on Horatio, but she frames her argument with examples from his first book, Aspects of Proteus. This essay was presented by Johnson at the Society for Jewish American and Holocaust Literature (JAHLIT) 2009 Symposium in Salt Lake City, UT. Kimberly Johnson is an Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University.

This is a short tribute to four poets who died in the month of January: Hyam Plutzik, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Brodsky, and W.B. Yeats. The piece includes discussion of literary links and allusions between the four. Originally published in the About.com Poetry e-newsletter on January 12, 2012. Edward Moran is the Literary Consultant to the Estate of Hyam Plutzik.

This essay is a discussion and analysis of Hyam Plutzik’s reaction, as expressed in several of his poems (most notably “For T.S.E. Only,” from Apples from Shinar) to the quiet yet unapologetic anti-Semitism of T.S. Eliot. Moran surveys both some critical discussion of Plutzik and Plutzik’s own handwritten lecture notes, finding that despite Eliot’s expressed view, Plutzik read, respected and taught Eliot’s poetry “and took pains to give him his due as a significant Modernist poet and critic.” As his poems tried to express, Plutzik’s response to Eliot was always one of attempted reconciliation and understanding as fellow “exiles.” The essay includes a careful reading of the poem “For T.S.E. Only” including exposition of scriptural and literary references. First presented at a T.S. Eliot Conference in St. Louis, MO, September 2009.

Offering a reading of Horatio through a post-Holocaust lens, this essay draws a parallel between Horatio’s quest to disseminate the truth of Hamlet’s story in the aftermath of violence with the struggle to document the truth of genocide, to honor the memory of the victims. The essay draws on examples from Plutzik’s letters and his own commentaries about Horatio, as well as critical reviews that appeared after the poem’s publication. It also includes a biographical overview highlighting Plutzik’s Jewish background and his role as a US Air Force Lieutenant in WW2. The essay was presented by Edward Moran at the JAHLIT 2008 Symposium in Salt Lake City, UT. Steven Sher is the author of thirteen books including collections of poetry, Jewish folk tales, essays, and stories.

A discussion of a theme in Plutzik’s lyric poems, including close readings of several poems from Aspects of Proteus and Apples from Shinar, as well as a few otherwise unpublished lyrics from The Collected Poems. The theme of Osherow’s discussion is an explication of Plutzik’s idea of “intermediate splendor” (see the final line of “The Geese”). She locates in these poems Plutzik’s appraisal of value in what is momentary, the paradoxes of mortality in time and of individuality among multiplicity, and poetry’s futile attempt to capture something as fleeting as experience and make it eternal. Osherow suggests that the struggle to do so is the splendor itself, just as the burning of the match in “An Agadah for Hyam Ben Samuel” is its “beauty and utility.” This essay was presented at the JAHLIT 2009 Symposium in Salt Lake City, UT. Jacqueline Osherow is a Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Utah.

In the Spring of 2012, Shapiro led a course at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at RIT in Rochester, NY on the poetry of Hyam Plutzik. This essay recounts some of the remarkable stories and inspiring coincidences discovered by the members of the class in the encounter with Plutzik’s poetry. Sidney Shapiro is a professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester.

This essay investigates the relationship between Plutzik’s Horatio and Shakespeare’s Hamlet as between the different forms and means of poetry and drama. A discussion of the use of fictions in the pursuit of understanding, and of different kinds of textual engagement toward the creation and dissemination of such fictions. By focusing most attention on links between the beginnings and endings of both Horatio and Hamlet, the essay also explores the limits of a text in terms of the highly permeable boundaries between text and reader, or between one text and another. Presented at the JAHLIT 2011 Symposium in Miami Beach, FL. Phillip A. Witte graduated from the University of Rochester in 2010, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D in English Literature at the University of Michigan.