The Silent Treatment: New Poems

“Richard Howard is an indispensable, unique poet, whose work instructs by delighting, and delights by instructing . . . he is Browning’s authentic heir at rendering the inner voices of the cultural past and present.”—Harold Bloom In a recent conversation with Priscilla Becker, published by the Poetry Society of America, Richard Howard commented on his many personae: “I don’t like direct self-expression. All the work that I do is some kind of invocation or transaction with others, whether it’s criticism, translation, or poetry. There are poems that are direct self-expression, but certainly, with some sense of preference, there is an enterprise which involves speaking through a mask, a persona. That’s what the word means: sounding through—sonans per—and I like the idea of the mask or the masks, because I’m more interested in the dialogue of others than in merely the dialogue with another—the dialogue of others who are out there, who are not me.” Hannah Arendt, George Eliot, Cosima Wagner, and a boy in a photograph by Arkansas photographer Mike Disfarmer are among the speakers in The Silent Treatment. Richard Howard is a poet, scholar, teacher, translator, and critic. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including most recently Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1965–2003, shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963–2003. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Robert Frost Medal.