Richard Howard



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

Life
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, For much of his career, Howard has written poems using a quantitative verse technique.

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.

Recognition
Howard won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his 1969 collection Untitled Subjects, which took for its subject dramatic imagined letters and monologues of 19th century historical figures.

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.

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

He served as Poet Laureate of the State of New York from 1994 to 1997.

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)

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