Howard Moss



Howard Moss (January 22, 1922 – September 16, 1987) was an American poet, dramatist and literary critic.

Life
Moss was born in New York City. He attended the University of Michigan, where he won a Hopwood Award.

He was poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine from 1948 until his death. He is credited with discovering a number of major American poets, including Anne Sexton and Amy Clampitt.

He was a closeted homosexual.

Recognition
Moss won the National Book Award in 1972 for his Selected Poems.

In popular culture
W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman co-wrote a famously concise clerihew in his honor:


 * TO THE POETRY EDITOR OF THE NEW YORKER
 * Is Robert Lowell
 * Better than Noël
 * Coward,
 * Howard?

Poetry

 * The Wound and the Weather (1946)
 * The Toy Fair (1954)
 * A Swimmer in the Air (1957)
 * A Winter Come, A Summer Gone: Poems, 1946-1960 (1960)
 * Finding Them Lost and Other Poems (1965)
 * Second Nature (1968)
 * Selected Poems (1971) —shared the National Book Award for Poetry with Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
 * Buried City: Poems (1975)

Plays

 * The Folding Green (1958)
 * The Oedipus Mah-Jongg Scandal (1968)
 * The Palace at 4 A.M. (1972)

Other

 * The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust (1963)
 * Instant Lives & More (1972)
 * Whatever is Moving (1981)