Education
A graduate of Columbia University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren, and where he now teaches.
A graduate of Columbia University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren, and where he now teaches.
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, 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.
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 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. 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)
In 1982, Howard was named a Chevalier of L'Ordre National du Mérite by the government of France.
His honors include the Levinson Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Literary Award, the Ordre National du Mérite from the French government, and the Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists (international association) Translation Medal, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. He was President of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists (international association) American Center (1979-80) and Poet Laureate of New York State (1994-96). Howard 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 from 1987 to 1997. He served as the poetry editor of The Paris Review and Western Humanities Review.
He is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and lives in New York City where he teaches in the Writing Division of the School of the Arts, Columbia University.
