Books by Richard Howard
Henri Matisse: Drawings 1936, A Facsimile Reproduction
by Henri Matisse, Christian Zervos, Tristan Tzara, Richard Howard
A collection written over fifty years, Makes You Stop and Think is the latest work from the accomplished and renowned poet Daniel Hoffman.
"The sonnet is a sacred // vessel, it takes a civilization / to conceive its shape or know / its uses," the poet Louise Bogan told "a crowd of bearded youths" and "rumpled girls." Hoffman's harvest of half a century's sonnets shows the richness and power of their form. These poems revel in exploring memory and feeling:
For reality is vintage and delicious
Especially when you taste it while it brews
Because it comes as love comes, heart-skip sudden,
Yet long as a lifetime in a once past wishes,
A gift you couldn't have the wit to choose.
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Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003
Adroit, inventive essays culled from a lifetime of literature
For decades Richard Howard's stylish, deeply informed criticism has enlightened and entertained his devoted audiences. Here is a comprehensive selection of his finest essays on a splendid range of subjects--from American poets like Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore to French artists such as Rodin and Michel Delacroix, from modern sculpture to the photography of the human body. And Howard brings to his consideration of French literature a rare wisdom drawn from his celebrated work as a translator of Stendhal and Gide, Barthes and Cocteau, Yourcenar and Gracq.
Richard Howard is a poet, scholar, teacher, critic, and translator. The author of more than a dozen books, including Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003, he is the recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award for translation. He teaches at Columbia University and is poetry editor of The Paris Review.
Finalist for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
Richard Howard has been writing stylish, deeply informed commentary on modern culture and literature for more than four decades. His earlier work Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 has long been hailed as a landmark in literary criticism. Paper Trail is a selection of his finest essays, including some never before published in book form, on a splendid range of subjects—from American poets such as Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore to French artists such as Rodin and Michel Delacroix. Also included are considerations of modern sculpture and of the photography of the human body.
Howard's intense familiarity with modern poetry is seen to excellent effect in essays on "the poetry of forgetting," on the cause and effects of experimental poetry, and on the first books of poets whose work he helped introduced. Of course, Howard brings to his consideration of French literature a rare wisdom drawn from his celebrated work as a translator of Stendhal and Gide, Barthes and Cocteau, Yourcenar and Gracq.
"If Richard Howard were not a poet at all, he would stand out nevertheless as a translator, an editor, a teacher of poets, and a critic of French, English, and American literature. Paper Trail collects his arrestingly elaborate essays on all three, as well as Howard's writings on visual art . . . The essays in Paper Trail offer language at least as intricate as that of Howard's verse, and information in even greater abundance: They can teach what the poems assume we know. Howard's preference for mannered abstractions, which can hinder the poems, assists the essays, making them more ambitious, and more daring, than most; even when their particular judgments do not convince, their general propositions enlighten."—Stephen Burt, The Washington Post Book World
"If Richard Howard were not a poet at all, he would stand out nevertheless as a translator, an editor, a teacher of poets, and a critic of French, English, and American literature. Paper Trail collects his arrestingly elaborate essays on all three, as well as Howard's writings on visual art . . . The essays in Paper Trail offer language at least as intricate as that of Howard's verse, and information in even greater abundance: They can teach what the poems assume we know. Howard's preference for mannered abstractions, which can hinder the poems, assists the essays, making them more ambitious, and more daring, than most; even when their particular judgments do not convince, their general propositions enlighten."—Stephen Burt, The Washington Post Book World
"Howard, with a text, is like the boyfriend everyone wants: he sees you for who you really are, and still loves you. His sympathy, like his culture, is immense. At the same time, because of his Stradivarian attunement to language (no surprise in a distinguished poet and translator), he sees what is actually there, the words, and from them along extracts the meaning. His
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Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003
The poems of Richard Howard are noted for their unique dramatic force and for preserving, in their graceful, exquisitely wrought lines, human utterance at its most urbane. Inner Voices, the first volume to draw together material from Howard's twelve books of poems, leaves no doubt as to why he has been called "a powerful presence in American poetry for 40 years" (The New York Times Book Review).
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Repetition: A Novel
by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Richard Howard
We are in the bombed-out Berlin of 1949, after the Second World War, rendered with an atmosphere reminiscent of Orson Welles’ The Third Man. Henri Robin, a special agent of the French secret service, arrives in the ruined former capital to which he feels linked by a vague but recurrent childhood memory. But the real purpose of his mission has not been revealed to him, for his superiors have decided to afford him only as much information as is indispensable for the action expected of his blind loyalty. But nothing is what it seems, and matters do not turn out as anticipated.
Indeed, the events that punctuate the secret agent’s stay in Berlin are liable to abrupt transitions, thrilling and questionable in equal measure: a shooting, a kidnapping, druggings, encounters with pimps and teenage whores, police interrogations, even some elegantly staged torture. These bloody events take place amid thick fog along the city’s canals, and even more mysterious narrative tricks. Robinor is the narrator actually twin brothers?falls in love with a mysterious woman named Jo Kast (a reference to Oedipus’s mother Jocasta). Her teenaged daughter Gegenecke (the German translation of Antigone), a provocative blonde, will form a strange partnership reminiscent of the blind Oedipus led into exile by Antigone. Dupont, the hero of The Erasers, returns here as van Brucke (both names mean Of the Bridge,” one in French, the other in German). In this astonishing fictional cat-and-mouse game, reminiscent of Daedalus’s labyrinth, nothing that is remembered can be altogether true, but only what is remembered can be real.
Readers of Robbe-Grillet’s novel Erasers will recognize, as the secret agent of Repetition slowly becomes aware that he was in Berlin beforeas a child, with his mother, perhaps looking for his fatherthe same allusions to bits and pieces of the Oedipus story built into the hero’s own. Indeed erasing” a story by retelling it is the central motif of all Robbe-Grillet’s fiction and films, of which this latest and probably last novel is in many ways the most revealing and triumphant version.
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Repetition: A Novel
by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Richard Howard
The French spokesperson for nouveau roman pens a creepy, atmospheric spy novel set in war-ravaged 1949 Berlin as Henri Robin, an agent for the French secret service, embarks on a mission whose real purpose he does not know.
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Without Saying
In Richard Howard’s new collection, voices of myth and memory prevail, if only by means of prevarication: the voice of Medea’s mother trying to explain her daughter’s odd behavior to an indiscreet interviewer; or first and last the voice of Henry James, late in life, faced with the disputed prospect of meeting L. Frank Baum and then, later on, “managing” not only Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird but his own unruly cast of characters, including Mrs. Wharton and young Hugh Walpole.
Richard Howard’s honors include the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN Medal for Translation, and grants from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.
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The Silent Treatment
“Richard Howard is an indispensable, unique poet, whose work instructs by delighting, and delights by instructing . . . he is Browning’s authentic heir at rendering the inner voices of the cultural past and present.”—Harold Bloom
In a recent conversation with Priscilla Becker, published by the Poetry Society of America, Richard Howard commented on his many personae:
“I don’t like direct self-expression. All the work that I do is some kind of invocation or transaction with others, whether it’s criticism, translation, or poetry. There are poems that are direct self-expression, but certainly, with some sense of preference, there is an enterprise which involves speaking through a mask, a persona. That’s what the word means: sounding through—sonans per—and I like the idea of the mask or the masks, because I’m more interested in the dialogue of others than in merely the dialogue with another—the dialogue of others who are out there, who are not me.”
Hannah Arendt, George Eliot, Cosima Wagner, and a boy in a photograph by Arkansas photographer Mike Disfarmer are among the speakers in The Silent Treatment.
Richard Howard is a poet, scholar, teacher, translator, and critic. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including most recently Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1965–2003, shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963–2003. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Robert Frost Medal.
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A Progressive Education: Poems
How extraordinary that the only poetry collection devoted to the trials and tribulations of an entire class of sixth graders is written by the eighty-five-year-old MacArthur Grant and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Howard!
Although loosely based on the poet's own progressive education in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1940s, the poems are set mostly in the present day.
Richard Howard is a poet of personality, of history, and of a sensibility rooted in knowledge. In his fifteenth collection, Howard captivates the reader as he and the class grapple with science and literature, teacher and principal, and the hard facts and comic fancies of life itself.
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Richard Howard Loves Henry James and Other American Writers
A lauded American poet's tributes to Walt Whitman and Henry James, now collected for the first time.
Richard Howard has long been recognized as one of America’s finest poets, celebrated as an author for his keen engagement with other authors, and especially for his sparkling and trenchant dramatic monologues and two-part inventions. Through the years, Howard has, in this way, given voice to all sorts of historical and literary figures, but two of his favorite subjects are two of his favorite writers—Walt Whitman and Henry James—and this book gathers an array of poems in which he responds to these great gay forebears, as well as to two other beloved Americans, Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens. Here Whitman the good gray poet opens his door to Bram Stoker and to Oscar Wilde; Henry James struggles to take stock of Los Angeles, where he is to have lunch with L. Frank Baum; Edith Wharton reminisces about her fraught friendship with the Master; poor Pansy from The Portrait of a Lady broods on her dreadful father; and late in life Wallace Stevens visits Paris—as Stevens never did. Howard’s wonderful inventions are as expansive and celebratory and human as Whitman, as deeply and subtly inquiring as James, as sumptuously meditative as Stevens, and as arresting and delightful as Richard Howard himself.
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