Richard Howard

Poet, Translator, and Literary Critic Class of 1996
location icon Location
New York, New York
age iconAge
67 at time of award
age iconDate Deceased
March 31, 2022

About Richard's Work

Richard Howard is a poet, a translator, a literary critic, and an essayist.

In his poems of historical inquiry and those of a more personal nature, Howard has explored the privations and privileges of the artistic sensibility.  He is the translator of some 150 works from the French, including books by Simone de Beauvoir, E.M. Cioran, and Roland Barthes.  As a critic, his essays and reviews address a wide variety of subjects, including art, history, photography, sexual politics, and literature.  His numerous books of poetry include Untitled Subjects (1969) and more recently, Talking Cures: New Poems (2002).  He is the author of Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 (1969, new ed. 1980), and co-editor of Preferences: Fifty-One American Poets Choose Poems from Their Own Work and from the Past (1974).

Biography

Howard is the Professor of Practice in the Writing Division of Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and is the poetry editor of the Paris Review and the Western Humanities Review.  He formerly held teaching positions at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, where he was the Luce Visiting Scholar in 1983, and at the University of Houston (1987-1997).

Howard received a B.A. (1951) and an M.A. (1952) from Columbia University, and studied at the Sorbonne (1952-53).

Last updated January 1, 2005

Published on July 1, 1996

Select News Coverage of Richard Howard