Untitled Subjects

Richard Howard

Richard Howard has emerged in the past few decades as one of America's foremost poets, a man whose every release sends college English professors swooning to their beds to take a “rest cure” (while of course sitting under the covers with a flashlight devouring the poems). And deservedly so; Howard's mature work is the stuff dreams are made of. Not often in a person's lifetime does a book like, say, No Traveller come along. One is tempted to put much of this down to his impeccable taste; Howard is equally lauded for his translation skills, which he has applied to such classics as Robbe-Grillet's Repetition, Breton's Nadja, and Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince. Obviously, the boy has a thing for surrealism, and it informs his work in the most wondrous of ways.

But then the question becomes, what was his stuff like before that? Enter the present volumes, 1969's Untitled Subjects, a series of dramatic monologues from various great figures (or attendants to/acquaintances of same) that span the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The poetic connoisseur will likely see the words “dramatic monologue” and think, first, of Robert Browning, and said connoisseur would not be far off the mark in thinking so.

Howard writes for the most part in free and blank verse rather than Browning's logorrheic iambic pentameter, and that alone makes Howard's work the more readable (if at some points a bit more forgettable as well). It may be a comparison of apples and oranges, and running such a comparison puts reviewers at risk of falling victim to the “what is poetry?” debate. But Howard is worth the risk, and at the time of the book's release notables such as Harold Bloom and James Dickey were quick to point out the Browning comparison so this reviewer figures he's on relatively safe ground. Only time can tell whether such lovely pieces as “1915,” an existential crisis of William Morris' wife Jane, or “1851,” a letter purportedly written by John Ruskin while on his honeymoon, will stand with “Fra Lippo Lippi” in the canon of literature. Whether they deserve to or not is of course a matter of subjectivity, but I think they're pretty darn good. Browning needs to scoot over a bit and make room for Howard on that short shelf.