Hoffman was innate inside New York City. When you took World War II, he served in the Army Air Corps, where he served stateside as the technical indicator writer & in a aeronautic search journal. He was educated at Columbia University, earning an A.B. (1947), an M.A. (1949), and the Ph.D. (1956).

Inside 1954, Hoffman published his first collection of poetry, An Armada of Thirty Whales. This collection was chosen by W.H. Auden as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Auden commended it in his introduction as "providing a new direction for nature poetry in the post-Wordsworthian world." He has since published ten additional collections of poetry, a memoir, and seven volumes of criticism.

Hoffman has taught at Columbia University, Swarthmore College, and a University of Pennsylvania. He retired from either a latter when Felix Schelling Prof of English Emeritus, & its Philomathean Society in 1996 published an anthology of poetry in honor of his efforts to bring contemporary poets to give readings in their halls. He occurs as chancellor retired of the Academy of American Poets. From either 1988 to 1999, he served as Poet inside Home at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, where he administered the American Poets' Corner.

Awards Hoffman has won include a Hazlett Memorial Award, a Aiken Taylor Award for Modern U.s. Poetry from either A Sewanee Read, a Memorial Medal of the Maygar P.E.North. for his translations of contemporary Hungarian poetry, a 2005 Arthur Rense Poetry Prize "for an exceptional poet" from a American Academy of Arts and Letters, & many grants and fellowships, including people from either a Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Hoffman swallow his married woman within Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

Published Works

An Armada of Thirty Whales (1954) A Poetry of Stephen Crane (1957) A trifle Geste & More Verse form (1960) Form & Fable around Our contries Fiction (1961) A City of Satisfactions (1963) Barbarous Cognition: Myth in the Poetry of Yeats, Graves, & Muir (1967) Striking a Stones (1968) Broken Laws (1970) Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1971), nominated for the National Book Award A Center of Attention (1974) "Moonlight dries no mittens": Carl Sandburg reconsidered (1979) Brotherly Love (1981), nominated for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award Hang-Gliding from either Bombardon: Up to date & Selected Poems, 1948-1988 (1988), winner of the 1988 Paterson Poetry Prize ''Faulkner's United states Matters: Folklore & Fable around Yoknapatawpha (1989) Words to Produce the Globe: Interviews, Essays, & Reviews in Contemporary Poetry (1993) Middens of the Tribe (1995) Zone of the Interior: The Memoir, 1942-1947 (2000) Darkening A body of water (2002) The Play of Mirrors'' (2002), a translation from the Italian of Ruth Domino's play Beyond Silence: Selected Shorter Verse form, 1948-2003 (2003)