Craft: Hyam Plutzik

Hyam Plutzik (1911–1962) was a poet, once known, and now known almost not at all. Though he died at 50, he published three books—Aspects of Proteus (1949), Apples from Shinar (1959), and Horatio (1961). 

Plutzik’s poems reflect his Jewish identity¹, anxieties about the Cold War and the Atomic Age, and an awareness of the border area between the vacuity of the world and the physicality of the world. Ted Hughes said Plutzik “engag[ed] the modern world as a stripped soul—with a point-blank, wholehearted simplicity of voice. His visions are authentic and piercing, and the song in them is strange—dense and harrowing, with unforgettable tones.”

Prof. Plutzik at the University of Rochester, c. 1950