INNER VOICES
Selected Poems 1963-2003
By Richard Howard
Farrar Straus Giroux. 428 pp. $35
PAPER TRAIL
Selected Prose 1965-2003
By Richard Howard
Farrar Straus Giroux. 434 pp. $35
If Richard Howard were not a poet at all, he would stand out nevertheless as a translator, an editor, a teacher of poets (most recently at Columbia University) and a critic of French, English and American literature. Paper Trail collects his arrestingly elaborate essays on all three, as well as Howard's writings on visual art. The same expertise, assurance and interest in other people's lives also animate Howard's verse, which has been collected in Inner Voices.
"I am," Howard admits in Paper Trail, "too much in the pay of the past." This modest sentence means both that Howard's poems rely overmuch on historical sources and that they focus on nostalgia and regret. Those poems first gained attention with the Pulitzer Prize-winning volume Untitled Subjects (1969), a book of poems spoken by historical figures, most of them Victorians near the end of a long life: Wilkie Collins, Jane Morris (William's widow), Ruskin, Tennyson, Gladstone. The dramatic monologues, dialogues and meditative poems of later collections concern, among many others, Richard Strauss, Edith Wharton (and Wharton's male companion's male lover), Canaletto, Peggy Guggenheim, John Milton and his daughters, the elderly Alice Liddell (the model for Alice in Wonderland) and Wallace Stevens (on an imagined secret visit to Paris, where he meets the young Richard Howard). Five poems take place in that capital of nostalgia, Venice, where Howard decides that "happiness" is "founded/ on forgetting -- only wisdom, poor wisdom,/ relies on memory." Howard's Ruskin in Venice goes further, and sounds sadder still: "I daresay love is very well when it does not/ Mean leaving behind."
Love in Howard often means love between men. "My nature must be/ at the root male and passionate," says another figure. Howard created obviously gay speakers when few American poets had dared to do so, and made them not only open about their passions but teasingly, even languorously so. He remains fascinated not only by gay men in cultural history but by other examples of the supposedly perverse or unnatural, from sadism to mere showy display. In "Howard's Way" (a poem addressed to Marcel Proust), a secretive circle gathers to watch exotic pornography, composing (to Howard's dismay) an elite not unlike the audience for much modern art. He takes a broader interest in indirection, concealment, even gossip: "you and the person we both call X fell out . . . over the daub you photographed 'for me.' " Such passages can make readers feel like eavesdroppers; as with real eavesdropping, the more you know coming in, the more you can take away.
Poetic form serves Howard almost as a frame, a proscenium, within which his people reveal themselves. He favors syllabics (line length determined by number of syllables) or free verse that sounds like syllabics: Rather than rushing toward closure, his lines open up to admit further qualifications, nervous evasions, "the small/ change of small changes." Their models include Robert Browning, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden and Henry James: Paper Trail praises James's "long and idiorhythmic sentence," calling his "grammar . . . a variant of glamour." On a bad day almost everyone in Howard's work sounds like James -- frustrated, terminally indirect, indistinguishable: "And it is better, this unrequited/ attachment of ours to things in general,/ this long perspective we might call tragic/ if we did not, like Starnina, call it/ love." "I find it pitiful to contemplate/ our mutual conceit/ on those absurd occasions, now that we know/ all that has intervened./ Yet what do we know, really?" "I refer// to the patently incorrigible/ yen to inscribe our handiwork,/ or rather the play of our hands, upon/ whatever amplitude is bare/ enough to enable our disclosure." The first speaker is an Italian Renaissance monk, the second Isadora Duncan, the third Howard in his own person.
The essays in Paper Trail offer language at least as intricate as that of Howard's verse, and information in even greater abundance: They can teach what the poems assume we know. Howard's preference for mannered abstractions, which can hinder the poems, assists the essays, making them more ambitious, and more daring, than most; even when their particular judgments do not convince, their general propositions enlighten. James, Proust and Roland Barthes (whom Howard knew personally) are tutelary spirits as well as repeated topics. Pieces on French writers end up being the most informative, the ones on visual art the most lyrical -- an essay on Delacroix becomes a locodescriptive prose ode: "the landscapes of Paris, the urban tableaux, are to be read upside down: the city grows from its sky. . . . "
Despite their sentences' sometimes extraordinary length, both the poems and the prose can be strikingly quotable: "You must be very religious indeed/ to change your religion"; "the picture we have inherited of this author leaves us uncertain whether to put it over the fireplace or in it." Howard says that the French writer Claude Simon creates "an utterance that rises from (and perhaps justifies) the debacle which is our consciousness of our history, our contention with our bodies, and our mistrust of the mind." He might say the same of himself.
A short book of Howard's best poems would encompass "Oracles," "A Message to Denmark Hill," "Infirmities," "Nicholas Mardruz," "Elementary Principles at 72" (a rare example of his personal lyric), "Occupations," "The Lesson of the Master" and a dozen or so others, with endnotes to help with contexts and sources. Inner Voices is not that book: At more than 400 pages (and without endnotes), the volume does not make a very selective selected. At worst the poems sound fussy, all too stylized, with a roster of speakers who love to hear themselves talk. At best the poems, like the essays, show unrivaled erudition, exemplary intellect, genuine wisdom and unusual attention to contexts, conversations, interactions, to all that makes us real to other people, and gives us evidence of our own past -- evidence few poets, these days, even seek. •
Stephen Burt teaches at Macalester College. His first book of literary criticism, "Randall Jarrell and His Age," will be published in paperback this spring, and his next book of poems will be published in 2006.
