He is the son of Robert Fraser and Elsie James Hine. He taught at University of Chicago.
He was an editor of Poetry magazine, from 1968-78. The correspondence is held at Indiana University.
His work appeared in the New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New Yorker, The Tamarack Review, The Paris Review,
He first came out as gay in his 1975 work In & Out, which was initially available only in a privately-printed version in limited circulation. The work did not gain general publication until 1989.
In Puerilities, Hine has beautifully re-created Book XII of the Greek Anthology; it stands as a translation, and as a poetic achievement in its own right. Puerilities entertains, and can move one too.
Daryl Hine, celebrated for translations of the Homeric Hymns and Theocritus, has embarked on his own autobiography in classical disguise in Academic Festival Overtures. Though the poem is written in self-proclaimed alexandrines (by alternating 13 and 12 syllables), its indented patterning is suggestive rather of Ovid (part Tristia, part Amores). The narrative impulse races through long paragraphs, while a rhyme scheme insistently coagulates internal elements into epigrammatic quatrains. It is a virtuoso achievement, as remarkable in its way as anything by Auden. It is also a remarkable record of a yearning, bookish and inhibited boyhood.
Hine's robust languagegleams with what sonneteers used to call sprezzatura, the confident, making-it-look-easy gloss that greases great art.
At certain moments, in reading him, one has the startled sense that language has arrived at a kind of impasse which only a quick scintillation of wit — in the form of a sly rhyme, a subtle pun or an extravagant rhetorical flourish — can grace, if not elude. As a result, Hine’s poems, unlike the brittle pirouettes of the formalist, seem to take shape, in all their glistening eloquence, hot from some secret forge...Hine succeeds at something which once was commonplace but has now become sadly rare: he writes poems which give pleasure to the reader.
One cannot write about Daryl Hine without using words like "bravura" and "virtuosity."