Like Good and Bad Angels, two spirits of very different kinds are at work in Richard Howard's six books of poetry to date. One is genial and generous, and shows itself in the two best known of the volumes, Untitled Subjects (1969) and Two-Part Inventions (1974)…. [The] measure of the heights to which the books rise can best be taken in terms of pleasure. There is an ampleness about the books that is perhaps the sine qua non of pleasure itself. For the reader of the poetry entire, however, the ...

Richard Howard's verse is elegant and cultured, tasteful and erudite. A man of learning and a connoisseur, he brings to his poetry a mind trained in the rigors of French poetics and an ear attuned to the rhythms of Ronsard as well as those of Browning. In these days of vatic pronouncements and True Confessions, he remains a voice of civilization, a man trained in an older tradition. His poems speak clearly of his commitment to the mind and to precision of expression.

More than ever, Richard Howard's poems convey the sense of personal history transformed into a fable that is worth hearing. There is a powerful personality behind the poems of Fellow Feelings, and the individual pieces, from the opening poem "Decades," to "Howard's Way" and "Compulsive Qualifications," to "The Giant on Giant Killing" and "Vocational Guidance," convey this personality with a clarity that relates it to somethi...

Fellow Feelings contains some of [Richard Howard's] most impressive work. These include "Venetian Interior, 1889," a remarkably full rendering of the sad world of Pen Browning; "Decades"; and "The Giant on Giant-Killing." The latter two utilize Hart Crane's history and Donatello's bronze of David, respectively, to illumine Howard's own life. Both poems openly explore homosexuality: indeed, the book is the most out-of-the-closet collection...