Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003

Brad Leithauser

… Howard's essays, more than most, are about process -- the wayward, spontaneous flux of a lively mind in headlong literary discourse, often interrupting itself. They have the authentic feel of a speaking voice -- even if it is impossible to imagine anybody else speaking quite this way.
— The New York Times

Library Journal

Howard, a noted poet, translator, scholar, and critic, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 and was more recently poet laureate of New York State (1994-96). Published simultaneously with Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003, this work focuses on his efforts as a scholar of literary criticism in the areas of modern poetry and French literature over the past 40 years, with essays also covering prose, contemporary poetry, and the visual arts. Insightful and easily accessible, the essays are organized chronologically under broad categories (e.g., new poets) and include some unpublished work. The only thing missing is an introduction. Recommended for all academic collections.-Paolina Taglienti, Las Vegas Coll., North Las Vegas Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Well-crafted essays, forewords, and afterwords on poets and poetry by the critic, translator, editor, and poet. Howard brings sterling credentials to bear; as he writes in an lecture from 1996, with a mixture of irony and pride: "I am not merely a poet, though I am that, and I am not merely a critic of poetry, though I am that. . . . I address you now as a man who has scrutinized the current product (product!-I use the word with a certain compliant twinge) in extenso for thirty dutifully attentive years." So he has. But not just the current product: the collection opens with a sparking essay, from 1973, on Emily Dickinson, who was just then being rediscovered and needed her champions in a rhymeless time. Howard's consideration is highly illuminating, and it well illustrates his magpie technique of turning up glittering oddments: here, for instance, he stops briefly to ponder Dickinson's evident discomfort with the letter n, "as they have always seemed unfinished M's," closing that essay with a modest plea to allow a writer idiosyncrasies and tics that might otherwise bore or provoke us, for these may well "turn out to be that writer's solution to his own problems of composition and utterance." Elsewhere the noted translator of Baudelaire and other French writers turns his attention to Francophone literature, and especially on writers who are not much read today, such as Marguerite Yourcenar (Howard's magpie finding: she irritated Virginia Woolf), Claude Simon, and even the irreplaceable Stendhal. These admiring pieces, for those who care about such things, constitute a welcome antidote to John Miller and Mark Molesky's wooly anti-French screed Our Oldest Enemy (see below), and in anyevent they ought to awaken interest in those writers, which would be a grand service to them. Elsewhere still Howard praises then-new poets such as J.D. McClatchy, the writings of Brassai, the power of storytelling, and kindred matters, giving variety to an altogether satisfactory collection. Of interest to Howard's admirers and students-and anyone with patience for formal concerns, close reading, and "alien eloquence."