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)