Richard Howard

Richard Howard (born October 13, 1929) is a distinguished American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio and is a graduate of Columbia University, where he now teaches. He lives in New York City.

After reading French letters at the Sorbonne in 1952-53, Howard had a brief early career as a lexicographer. He soon turned his attention to poetry and poetic criticism, and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his 1969 collection Untitled Subjects, which took for its subject dramatic imagined letters and monologues of 19th century historical figures. For much of his career, Howard has written poems using a quantitative verse technique.

He was awarded the PEN Translation Prize in 1976 for his translation of E. M. Cioran's A Short History of Decay and the American Book Award for his 1983 translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. Howard was a long-time poetry editor of The Paris Review and is currently poetry editor of The Western Humanities Review. He has also received a Pulitzer prize, the Academy of Arts and Letters Literary Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he is Professor of Practice in the writing program at Columbia's School of the Arts. He was previously University Professor of English at the University of Houston and, before that, Ropes Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati. He served as Poet Laureate of the State of New York from 1994 to 1997.

In 1982, Howard was named a Chevalier of L'Ordre National du Mérite by the government of France.

Works

Poetry

Quantities (1962)
Damages (1967)
Untitled Subjects (1969)
Findings 1971
Two-Part Inventions (1974)
Fellow Feelings (1976)
Misgivings (1979)
Lining Up (1984)
No Traveller (1989)
Selected Poems (1991)
Like Most Revelations (1994)
Trappings (1999)
Talking Cures (2002)
Fallacies of Wonder (2003)
Inner Voices (selected poems), 2004
The Silent Treatment (2005)
Without Saying (2008)

Critical Essays

Alone With America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 (1969)
Preferences: 51 American Poets Choose Poems From Their Own Work and From the Past (1974)
Travel Writing of Henry James (essay) (1994)
Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1965-2003 (2004)

Major Translations (French to English)

Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire
La Guerre en Algérie by Jules Roy
Camera Lucida, and many other works by Roland Barthes
Simone de Beauvoir
Nadja by André Breton
Emil Cioran
Michel Foucault
Charles de Gaulle
André Gide
Jean Giraudoux
Serres chaudes by Maurice Maeterlinck
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Claude Simon
The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal
The Stars by Edgar Morin
A Happy Death by Albert Camus
The History of Surrealism by Maurice Nadeau
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

References

Richard Howard's biography in poets.org
"Praising Sacred Places: Richard Howard’s Jewish Roots," article by Benjamin Ivry in "The Forward."

External links

The poem "Only Different" at Guernica

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