Nuanced worlds

Poets of my generation remember when "Alone With America" was published in the 1970s. The title, taken from Perry Miller's "Errand Into the Wildness," gave us a glimpse of ourselves (students of poetry and our countrymen) as historical outsiders -- and history itself wrapped in Puritan and post-colonial loneliness: "Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the hill, they were left alone with America." These essays, "articles of faith," Richard Howard's exegesis of 41 poets, included a George Bernard Shaw quote: "If you cannot believe in the greatness of your own age and inheritance, you will fall into confusion of mind and contraiety of spirit."

The essayist shook off "contraiety of spirit" in dazzling empathy for the poets, including Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich and Carolyn Kizer. Howard may have found himself alone with America, but his faith in these voices represented a leap into a new age of aesthetic community, each "irreducible" poet an original voice.

Voice is a main tenet in Howard's articles of faith. The poet/critic James Longenbach sees Howard leaning hard on the boundaries of the lyric, "reclaiming discursive territories that over time poetry has ceded to fiction and drama." With the landmark publication of "Inner Voices" and "Paper Trail," Howard's readers are given the luxury of tuning in to decades of this discursiveness. Though Howard, as always, auditions himself: He ascertains that his writing is not so much dramatic as "theatrical." From a Paris Review interview: "My good dramatic monologues are good because the monologuist is me, the poem is not a game of cribbage."

At 75, Howard is a distinguished poet, scholar, critic, translator and teacher. He entered belle-lettres through the bound volumes in his grandfather's library and now, as doyen of American letters, he has surpassed expectations (so American!) that he "re-invent" himself by remaining emphatically who he is. In "Inner Voices," the reader witnesses the progression from the Auden-like syllabics of his first two books, "Quantities" and "Damages," into the irrepressible inventions of "Untitled Subjects" and beyond. Writing poetry became an extension of reading for the precocious child, both interior exile ("I didn't have to look away from home ... just further in ... ") and an opening-out into otherness: "When we consider the stars / (what else can we do with them?) and even / recognize among them sidereal / father figures ... "