Daryl Hine, an admired poet who adhered to classical themes, complicated formal structures and intricate rhyming patterns to explore themes of philosophy, history and his own sexuality, died on Monday in Evanston, Ill. He was 76.


The cause was an intestinal blockage related to a blood disorder, his editor and literary executor, Evan Jones, said.


Mr. Hine was also a translator of ancient works and, for several years, the editor of Poetry magazine.


Inspired by his education in the classics and his love of Latin, Mr. Hine wrote more than a dozen books of poetry, using traditional forms like the sestina (six stanzas of six lines each, followed by one of three lines). Two of these were book-length autobiographical poems — “In & Out” (published privately in 1975) and “Academic Festival Overtures” (1985) — that describe his unhappy upbringing and his emerging homosexuality.


In “In & Out,” Mr. Hine describes himself lying in bed in his college dorm, reading Shakespeare’s sonnets:


As I counted


my friends on my fingers, I numbered


my loves on my thumbs: they were double,


a man and a woman, of comfort,


respectively, and of despair.


His precise executions of complex constructions — a technical feat roughly analogous to achieving a perfect triple somersault with a half twist off a high board while everyone else cannonballs — earned him the respect of other poets and numerous awards and honors, including Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation fellowships.


His work, however, often put him out of step with the times, which were more apt to celebrate the raw, free-form work of poets like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Louis Dudek, a literary critic who focused on modernist poetry, once described Mr. Hine’s poetry as “a series of extremely recherché, abstract, contrived word forms, containing oblique and ambiguous philosophical essays and meditations.”


But the poet J. D. McClatchy, a friend of Mr. Hine’s, disagreed. “All that technical prowess.” Mr. McClatchy said, “was in service to a deep moral meditation on the course of human emotions.”


Mr. Hine’s last book of poems, “In Reliquary,” will be published next spring. He also published several critically respected translations of classic works by Homer, Ovid and Hesiod. He edited Poetry magazine, a publication of the Poetry Foundation, from 1969 to 1977.


William Daryl Hine was born on Feb. 24, 1936, in Burnaby, British Columbia, and raised in that province in New Westminster. The death of his mother, the former Elsie James, in 1950 devastated him as a teenager, and he subsequently struggled with his father, Robert Fraser Hine — an experience he detailed in “Overtures”:


With the suppression of sex and death and self-pity


We had nothing of much interest to discuss.


Emotionally in the absence of my mother


The nuclear family lost its nucleus,


Leaving us like unaffiliated electrons


In meaningless orbit about a central void,


Approaching only at the risk of a collision,


Which we were equally determined to avoid.


Mr. Hine left New Westminster to study at McGill University in Montreal and went on to earn a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Chicago in 1967. He lived in Europe for several years before returning to the Midwest to teach and edit.


His partner of more than 30 years, Samuel Todes, who had been a philosophy professor at Northwestern University, died in 1994. Mr. Hine is survived by his brother, Robert.


Plagued by illness, Mr. Hine lived largely as a shut-in after Mr. Todes died but continued to write, Mr. Jones, his editor, said. In his last published book, “&: A Serial Poem” (2010), which comprises a sequence of 303 poems of 10 lines each, Mr. Hine confronted his mortality:


Denied, deplored, but yet besought & beckoned,


Death will look like the last & least of accidents.


Who would ask such an unwelcome guest to stay


When its persistence must be reckoned by the second?