GLR January-February 2023

ESSAY

Richard Howard’s Threatening Poetry D AVID B ERGMAN

O NE OF OUR FINEST, however underappre ciated, American poets was Richard Howard, who died on March 31, 2022, at the age of 92. You may not have heard of him, but you may well have read one of the books he translated from the French. There are liter ally hundreds of them—everyone from De Gaulle to Saint-Ex upery, Cocteau to Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes to Jean-Paul Sartre. He translated with a grace that finally earned him the American Book Award in 1983 for Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal . He was also a teacher. According to Edmund White, an erstwhile lover, he knew “no love that was not ped agogical.” He was a brilliant, if eccentric, critic, especially of his contemporaries. His study Alone with America: Essay on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 (1969, en larged 1980) is a monument to postwar poetry. His blurbs were an art form in themselves. And he was a dear friend of mine for forty years. Richard was an adopted child. His adoptive mother came from a wealthy, highly cultured Jewish family from Cleve land, and, although he spent sixty years in NewYork City, his purring voice retained something of the Ohioan. Among his happiest moments as a child was being in the “magic cham ber” of his grandfather’s library, “a grand room with a cof fered ceiling, full of beautiful and untouchable matched sets” of books. At the age of five, he was taught French by an aunt, who thought it would be a way to amuse him on their long car trip from Ohio to Florida. He was sent to the Park School of Cleveland, which he celebrated in his final collection, Pro gressive Education (2014), in which he assumes the voice of a class of precocious sixth graders writing to their principal, Mrs. Masters, as well as to their teachers and fellow students. This book is an extraordinary accomplishment—he was in his eighties writing as though he were twelve. It is arguably his best and most approachable collection. Richard attended Columbia University, where his friends included John Hollander, Anthony Hecht, and Allen Gins berg. In fact, he dated Ginsberg, and Richard told me of an adventure he and Ginsberg embarked upon to the wilds of Flushing, Queens, in order to examine an illegally smuggled copy of Genet’s banned poetry. For many years he lived with novelist Sanford Friedman. If Richard Howard is underappreciated now—though anyone who has won the Pulitzer Prize and the forerunner to the National Book Award cannot be called unappreciated— and if he receives less attention than contemporaries like David Bergman’s 1991 book Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Rep resentation in American Literature has recently been released in a new edition by the University of Wisconsin Press.

James Merrill or John Ashbery, it may be because, as poetry critic James Longenbach has remarked, “Howard’s sensibility remains threatening to many readers.” How so? Much of his œuvre consists of dramatic monologues in the manner of Robert Browning, whose speakers reveal more than they wish to and test readers’ powers of discrimination. It’s a form that challenges the notion of “authenticity” that’s so valued by many poets. His poems may also be threatening because they test read ers’ knowledge of literature and history. To fully appreciate his dramatic monologues in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Untitled Subjects (1969), a reader will need a deep knowledge of 19th century British culture. A look at one poem will provide an idea of the challenges his work can pose. “1851—AMessage to Den mark Hill” begins simply enough: “My dearest father.” So it’s a letter from a son to his father, presumably a specific figure in British letters; but who? Even at the end, signed laconically

January–February 2023

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