Richard Howard

Richard Howard born 13 October 1929

Richard Howard is a distinguished American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio and is a graduate of Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

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.

Howard was a long-time poetry editor of The Paris Review and is currently poetry editor of The Western Humanities Review. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he is Professor of Practice in the writing programme at Columbia's School of the Arts.

He has translated more than 150 books by French authors - including Charles Baudelaire, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and Roland Barthes - and he has written incisive accounts of contemporary American poets, collected in Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 (1969). But his own searching and witty poetry is his most significant contribution to the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

Howard's persistent themes are those of identity, existential loneliness, and the losses exacted by time. Homosexuality, which he defines as not a problem but a solution, is a significant and continuing thread that runs through all the books.