Howard, Richard 1929–

PERSONAL: Born October 13, 1929, in Cleveland, OH. Education: Columbia University, B.A., 1951, M.A., 1952; Sorbonne, graduate study, 1952–53.

ADDRESSES: Home—23 Waverly Pl., New York, NY 10003. Office—Writing Division, Columbia University, 415 Dodge Hall, Mail Code 1808, 2960 Broadway, New York, NY 10027.

CAREER: Poet, critic, editor, lexicographer, educator, and translator. Worked as lexicographer with World Publishing Co., 1953–57; Yale University, Whitney Humanities Center, Luce Visiting Scholar, 1983–84; University of Houston, professor of English, 1987–97; University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, Ropes Professor of Comparative Literature, 1988; Columbia University, New York, NY, professor of writing and professor of practicein the School of the Arts, 1997–. Fellow at Morse College and Yale University.

MEMBER: Academy of American Poets (chancellor), PEN (president, PEN American Center, 1977–79), American Institute of Arts and Letters.

AWARDS, HONORS: Guggenheim fellow, 1966–67; Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, 1969; National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, 1970; Pulitzer Prize for poetry, 1970, for Untitled Subjects; Levinson Prize, Poetry magazine, 1973; Cleveland Arts Prize, 1974; American Book Award nomination, 1979, for translation of A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes; American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters medal for poetry, 1980; American Book Award, 1983, for translation of Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire; PEN American Center medal for translation, 1986; National Endowment for the Arts fellow, 1987; France-America Foundation Award for translation, 1987; New York State Poet Laureate, 1994–96; Lifetime Achievement Award, National Book Critics Circle, 2003; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, 2004, for Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965–2003; Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry, 2004, for Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963–2003; Ordre National du Mérite, government of France; PEN Translation medal; Academy of American Poets fellowship; MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

WRITINGS:

POETRY (EXCEPT WHERE NOTED)

Quantities (also see below), Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1962.

The Damages (also see below), Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1967.

Untitled Subjects, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1969.

Findings: A Book of Poems, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1971.

Two-Part Inventions, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1974.

Fellow Feelings, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1976.

Misgivings, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1979.

Lining Up, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1984.

Quantities/Damages: Early Poems (contains Quantities and The Damages), Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1984.

No Traveller: Poems, Knopf (New York, NY), 1989.

Like Most Revelations: New Poems, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 1994.

If I Dream I Have You, I Have You: Poems, Tibor de Nagy Editions (New York, NY), 1997.

Talking Cures: New Poems, Turtle Point Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963–2003, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2004.

Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965–2003, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2004.

The Curved Planks: Poems / A Bilingual Edition, translated by Yves Bonnefoy and Hoyt Rogers, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2006.

TRANSLATOR

Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur, Grove (New York, NY), 1958.

Claude Simon, The Wind, Braziller (New York, NY), 1959, reprinted, 1986.

Claude Simon, The Grass, Braziller (New York, NY), 1960, reprinted, 1986.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Two Novels: Jealousy [and] In the Labyrinth (also see below), Grove (New York, NY), 1960.

Andre Breton, Nadja, Grove (New York, NY), 1961.

Michel Butor, Degrees, Methuen (London, England), 1961, 1966.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad, Grove (New York, NY), 1962.

Michel Butor, Mobile, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1963.

Marc Saporta, Composition No. 1, A Novel, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1963.

Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1963.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers, Grove (New York, NY), 1964.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, Grove (New York, NY), 1966.

Jean Hytier, The Poetics of Paul Valery, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1966.

Jules Renard, Natural Histories, Horizon Press (New York, NY), 1966.

Maurice Nadeau, History of Surrealism, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1967.

Michel Leiris, Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility, Grossman (New York, NY), 1968.

Claude Simon, Histoire, Braziller (New York, NY), 1968.

Andre Gide, The Immoralist, Knopf (New York, NY), 1970.

Jean Genet, May Day Speech, City Lights (San Francisco, CA), 1970.

Jean Cocteau, Professional Secrets: An Autobiography, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1970.

E.M. Cioran, Fall into Time, Quadrangle (Chicago, IL), 1970.

Claude Simon, The Battle of Pharsalus, Braziller (New York, NY), 1971.

Albert Camus, A Happy Death, Knopf (New York, NY), 1972.

Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1972.

Maurice Pons, Rosa, Dial (New York, NY), 1972.

Robbe-Grillet, Project for a Revolution in New York, Grove (New York, NY), 1972.

Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, University Press Books (Berkeley, CA), 1973.

Claude Morin, Quebec versus Ottawa: The Struggle for Self-Government, 1960–1972, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1976.

Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, The Motorcycle, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1976.

Germaine Tillion, France and Algeria, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1976.

E.M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, Viking (New York, NY), 1976.

Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1977.

Saint-John Perse, Song for an Equinox, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1977.

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1977.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, In the Labyrinth, Grove (New York, NY), 1978.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy, Grove (New York, NY), 1978.

Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1978.

Laurent De Brunhoff, The One Pig with Horns, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1979.

Roland Barthes, New Critical Essays, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1980.

Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues, The Girl beneath the Lion, Riverrun Press (Edison, NJ), 1980.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1981.

Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues, The Girl on the Motorcycle, Riverrun Press (Edison, NJ), 1981.

Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues, The Margin, Riverrun Press (Edison, NJ), 1981.

Denis Moniere, Ideologies in Quebec: The Historical Development, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1981.

Maurice Sachs, Witches' Sabbath, Stein & Day (New York, NY), 1982.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Le Maison de Rendez-vous, Grove (New York, NY), 1982.

Roland Barthes, The Empire of Signs, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1982.

(With Matthew Ward) Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1983.

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, David R. Godine (Boston, MA), 1983.

Andre Gide, Corydon, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1983.

E.M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, Seaver Books (New York, NY), 1983.

Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, Harper (New York, NY), 1984.

Marguerite Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi, and Other Essays, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1984.

Charles De Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles De Gaulle, 1940–1946, Da Capo Press (New York, NY), 1984.

Jacques Leibowitch, A Strange Virus of Unknown Origin: A.I.D.S., Ballantine (New York, NY), 1985.

Georges Duby, William Marshal: The Flower of Chivalry, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1985.

Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1985.

Claude Simon, The Flanders Road, Riverrun Press (Edison, NJ), 1986.

Julien Gracq, The Opposing Shore, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1986.

Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge, The Last Flowers of Manet, Abrams (New York, NY), 1986.

Barthes, Michelet, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1986.

Barthes, The Rustle of Language, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1986.

Robbe-Grillet, Le Maison de Rendez-vous [and] Djinn, Grove (New York, NY), 1987.

Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1987.

Andre Gide, Return from the U.S.S.R. and Afterthoughts on My Return, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1987.

Jean Cocteau, Past Tense: The Cocteau Diaries, Volume I, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1987.

E.M. Cioran, History and Utopia, Seaver Books (New York, NY), 1987.

Christophe Betaille, Annam, New Directions (New York, NY), 1996.

Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century, introduction by Eugen Weber, Random House (New York, NY), 1996.

Christophe Bataille, Hourmaster, New Directions (New York, NY), 1998.

E.M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1998.

Marguerite Duras, No More, Seven Stories Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, Modern Library (New York, NY), 2000.

Honore de Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece; and, Gambara, New York Review of Books (New York, NY), 2001.

Claude Simon, The Trolley, New Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Maurice Maeterlinck, Hothouses: Poems, 1889, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2003.

Robbe-Grillet, Repetition: A Novel, Grove (New York, NY), 2003.

Pierre Michon, Lives under Glass, Archipelago Books (Brooklyn, NY), 2006.

Also translator of Barthes' The Semiotic Challenge, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), and Jean Paulhan's Flowers of Tarbes, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE).

OTHER

Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1969, new edition, 1980.

(Editor, with Thomas Victor) Preferences: Fifty-One American Poets Choose Poems from Their Own Work and from the Past, Viking (New York, NY), 1974.

(With Michael Filey) Passengers Must Not Ride on Fenders, Green Tree, 1974.

(Editor) Jule Roy, The War in Algeria, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1975.

Hellenistics, Red Ozier Press (Madison, WI), 1984.

(Contributor) Richard Marshall, Robert Mapplethorpe, New York Graphic Society Books (New York, NY), 1988.

(Interviewer) Lee Krasner: Umber Paintings, 1959–1962, Robert Miller Gallery (New York, NY), 1993.

(Coauthor) Brassai: The Eye of Paris, Museum of Fine Arts (New York, NY), 1999.

(With Brassai) Proust in the Power Photography, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2006.

Also author of Hellenistics. Director, Braziller Poetry Series, eighteen volumes.

Contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and numerous literary journals.

Poetry editor, Paris Review. Former poetry editor, New American Review, Shenandoah, and New Republic.

SIDELIGHTS: Richard Howard holds a distinguished place in contemporary American literature for his work as a poet, critic, and translator. As a translator, he is credited with introducing modern French fiction—particularly examples of the Nouveau Roman—to the American public, while his translation of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal won a National Book Award in 1984. As a critic, Howard's collection of essays titled Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950 was praised for its comprehensive overview of recent American poetry. Notably, his work as a poet earned Howard a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his collection Untitled Subjects.

Howard's poems are often dramatic monologues in which figures from history and literature speak directly to the reader. The voices of Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, and other prominent creative artists are recreated as they speak about their lives and times. Richard Ziegfeld commented in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that Howard's "effort to listen to historical voices creates taut narratives that often yield startling perspectives, but his deference to the voices also makes the verse impersonal, even when he treats autobiographical material."

Three poems in Howard's Quantities introduced his approach to the dramatic monologue. In "At Bluebeard's Castle," for example, the infamous pirate speaks of his murderous career. But these early attempts at the form were largely unsuccessful. With The Damages, however, Howard's poetry is more successful, and his dramatic monologues more fully realized. In "A Far Cry after a Close Call," Howard presents the sensations of a man who has nearly drowned, while in "To Aegidius Cantor," he turns to a character from the fifteenth century.

In Untitled Subjects, Howard explores the use of dramatic monologues extensively, the book being comprised of fifteen poems written in that form. Each poem features a personage from the nineteenth century who speaks of his life and work. Such people as Richard Strauss, John Ruskin, and William Thackeray are included. Because of the variety of characters presented in these poems, Howard displays an impressive spectrum of voices.

Since the publication of Untitled Subjects, Howard has continued to explore the use of monologue, dialogue, and other forms of the speaking voice in his poetry. In Two-Part Inventions, he creates imaginary conversations between historical persons. In Fellow Feelings, he uncovers shared assumptions and emotions between himself and such writers as Walt Whitman and Charles Baudelaire. The poems of Misgivings are all addressed to the subjects of nineteenth-century photographic portraits, while those of Lining Up are the voices of artists and musicians. Speaking to Allen Wiggins of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Howard explained that in his poems he tries to get "out of the way of voices, letting the voices speak through me and for me, and I have discovered that my own experience can be represented much better than it can be presented." Howard's use of voices has set his poetry apart from many of his contemporaries' efforts. "The voices," Wiggins acknowledged, "are Howard's trademark as a poet."

Through these monologues delivered by writers, artists, and musicians, Howard studies the nature of the artistic experience. Ziegfeld, speaking of Howard's dramatic monologues, observed that these works "rival Browning's in terms of compelling narrative, vivid detail, and inventive perception of the historic personage under scrutiny."

These same elements—dramatic monologues, impersonation, a focus on art and artists—are present in Howard's tenth original volume of poetry, Like Most Revelations, published in 1994. In this work, Howard inhabits the voices of Edith Wharton and Walt Whitman, and he also offers elegies for friends who have died from AIDS and cancer. "AIDS is everywhere in this book, as it is everywhere in the communities—artistic and intellectual, urban, gay—to which this book most commonly refers and addresses itself," remarked Linda Gregerson in Poetry. Commented Robert Boyers in the New Republic: "Moved by the wit and the cunning insinuations of Howard's language, we may feel that the poems are unduly pleased with their own recourses and devices." Nevertheless, Boyers commented: "A poet of color and substance, of line and idea, too often Howard has been misread as a poet exclusively committed to surfaces." In the end, Boyers had high praise for the volume, stating: "No body of work by a contemporary American poet has offered so many alluring torsos, has invited a comparably various and eager responsiveness." Likewise, Gregerson summed up the volume as "limber, literate, jubilantly crafted, wry, and, above all, densely peopled."

Howard's work as a translator has also won critical praise. "Had Howard done nothing but translate all his life he would have been one of the greatest translators who ever blessed English," commented reviewer Willis Regier in Prairie Schooner. Howard has translated more than one hundred books into English and received several awards for his work, including an American Book Award. He began this career in 1957 when he was offered the chance to translate a book from the original French. After translating the book, he subsequently met the author and found that he "knew more about that man's mind than I did about most of my friends because I had worked with his prose," Howard told Wiggins. "The relationship of the translator to the writer is an erotic relationship always, and you learn something about the person that you're working with in an almost plastic, physical way that you can almost never learn about your friends." Howard's translations have made him "one of the outstanding translators of contemporary French literature," Ziegfeld stated.

Although he has translated the works of many major French writers of today, particularly those associated with the Nouveau Roman, Howard won the American Book Award for his translation of Les Fleurs du Mal, a nineteenth-century book of poetry by Charles Baudelaire. Paul Zweig of the New York Times Book Review called Howard's version "the first genuinely readable Baudelaire in English…. It is a triumph of tone…. [The] translations are excellent; at times, they are brilliant." Writing in the Nation, Peter Brooks claimed that Howard's translation "will long stand as definitive, a superb poetic guide to France's greatest poet."

In Alone with America, Howard analyzes forty-one American poets who have come to prominence since 1950. Disregarding the various schools of poetry, he concentrates on poets who have achieved recognition for their individual styles. These poets, Howard explains in the text, are considered as "free-standing creative figures."

Two books from 2004 offer generous samplings of Howard's prose and poetry works, providing a concise overview of almost four decades of his writing. Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965–2003 contains "well-crafted essays, forewords, and afterwords on poets and poetry by the critic, translator, editor, and poet," commented a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Howard includes a 1973 essay on Emily Dickinson, written during a time when the poet was at the point of being rediscovered by academics and poetry readers. He discourses on French literature; offers an appreciation of the writing of Brassai; assembles critical assessments of Jane Austen, Marianne Moore, and Yourcenar; and examines the power inherent in storytelling. Howard also shows his appreciation for the rising generation of poets, as in his essay in praise of the work of then-new poet J.D. McClatchy. Howard also offers personal insights on his Jewish heritage, his younger days in Cleveland Heights, his wonder at his grandfather's tremendous library, and his public education. The Kirkus Reviews critic called the book "an altogether satisfactory collection."

Collected within Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963–2003 are favorite poems, noteworthy verse, and other works selected and ordered by Howard from numerous of his early works. The book is "a parquet entrance to Howard's poetry for those who have not encountered it yet," wrote Regier. Many of the poems "reflect his lifelong admiration for the arts," Regier noted, and include works on the musical figures Wagner, Rossini, and Offenbach; sculptors Da Fiesole and Dorothea Tanning; theater figure Sarah Bernhardt; photographer Nadar; and many others. He includes poems in such traditional styles as epistles, love poems, elegies, and homages. Howard's signature style of poetry, dramatic monologues crafted in the voice of a character from history, can also be plentifully encountered here. "On the whole, these densely figured poems justify the copious ambition they embody," observed a reviewer in Publishers Weekly.

Evaluations of Howard usually judge his work as a poet to be his most important contribution to contemporary American literature. However, his work has and continues to attract a wide and enthusiastic audience among readers, academics, and critics alike. "Inner Voices and Paper Trail are inexpensive medicine for anyone needing concentrated doses of high literature," Regier concluded.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Authors in the News, Volume 1, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1976.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 7, 1977, Volume 10, 1979, Volume 47, 1988.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1980.

Howard, Richard, Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1969, new edition, 1980.

PERIODICALS

Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 31, 1974, Allen Wiggins, interview with Richard Howard.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2004, review of Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965–2003, p. 727.

Nation, November 6, 1982, Peter Brooks, "The Flowers of Evil," p. 571; December 24, 1983, Grace Schulman, review of Lining Up, p. 669.

New Republic, March 27, 1995, Robert Boyers, review of Like Most Revelations, p. 39.

New York Times Book Review, July 25, 1982, Paul Zweig, review of Le Fleurs du Mal, p. 3.

Poetry, February, 1996, Linda Gregerson, review of Like Most Revelations, p. 287.

Prairie Schooner, summer, 2005, Willis Regier, review of Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963–2003, p. 181.

Publishers Weekly, September 20, 2004, review of Inner Voices, p. 58.

ONLINE

Academy of American Poets Web site, (March 2, 2006), biography of Richard Howard.

Columbia University Graduate Writing Program Web site, http://wwwapp.cc.columbia.edu/art/app/arts/writing/ (March 25, 2006), biography of Richard Howard.

State University of New York at Albany Web site, http://www.albany.edu/ (March 25, 2006), biography of Richard Howard.