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 elusiveness of memory through a search for the true identity of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Three of Plutzik’s books, including Horatio, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry,[1] and his work continues to garner praise from leading scholars and critics.
[citation needed] 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).
[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 Kreymborg 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.
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.
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).
[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.
[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.
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.”[citation needed] 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.
It featured appearances by prominent American poets such as Hayden Carruth, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Stanley Kunitz, and Grace Schulman.
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.
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.
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.