Richard Howard's "Gustave Dore"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2024

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

Richard Howard (born Oct 13, 1929, died march 31, 2022) was credited with introducing modern French fiction—particularly examples of the Nouveau Roman—to the American public; his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1984) won a National Book Award in 1984. A selection of Howard’s critical prose was collected in the volume Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1965-2003, and his collection of essays Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950 (1969) was praised as one of the first comprehensive overviews of American poetry from the latter half of the 20th century. First and foremost a poet, Howard’s many volumes of verse also received widespread acclaim; he won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection Untitled Subjects. His other honors included the American Book Award, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the PEN Translation Medal, the Levinson Prize, and the Ordre National du Mérite from the French government. For many years, Howard was the poetry editor of the Paris Review.

Evaluations of Howard usually judge his work as a poet to be his most important contribution to contemporary American literature. However, his work has and continues to attract a wide and enthusiastic audience among readers, academics, and critics alike.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is
0:05.9	Tuesday, April 9th, 2004. Today's poem is by Richard Howard, and it's called Gustav Dore.
0:14.5	This is the second in our sequence of ectfrastic poems. And this is a poem that really grows beyond the ecthrases,
0:24.4	but at the heart of the poem, literally, structurally, but also metaphorically,
0:29.9	is a reflection upon some of Dore's actual works.
0:36.1	Gustave Dore, of course, a famous painter and sculpture, but particularly remembered for his many engravings,
0:42.5	especially of classic works of literature, which include the Vulgate Bible, the divine comedy,
0:49.8	Paradise Lost, Don Quixote, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the list goes on and on. Dore was prolific in his lifetime. However, he was not always happy, which is something that this poem delves into, quite frankly. In fact, the jumping off point for Howard's poem here is the end of Dore's life and the way in which the circumstances of his end both shape his legacy, that also help us interpret his legacy.
1:23.6	He had a hard time finding the recognition and following that he wanted in his native France
1:32.0	and was forced to move to England before he realized the dreams of real artistic success,
1:43.7	which must have been a blow to him to be, in many ways, spurned by
1:48.9	your native land, although he lived in Paris for many years and tried to make a go of it there.
1:54.8	Howard also mentions in the poem, The Place of Dory's Birth, Strasbourg, which was French when he was born, but in the
2:04.3	course of his lifetime fell into German hands, another sort of historical alienation for him.
2:12.4	Dory, who never found love, never married in his lifetime, but had a very close relationship with his mother,
2:20.5	one that Sigmund Freud would probably have a field day with. And near the end of Dory's own life,
2:27.5	he had to suffer the loss of his mother, which was very hard on him. Some biographers would say
2:34.1	that he never really recovered from that.
2:37.7	And so it's in the midst of all of this suffering and meditation on this suffering and sadness
2:43.1	that Howard gives us explicit mention of only two of Dore's many famous engravings, his illustrations for the
2:53.6	ancient mariner and for the epic of the wandering Jew, which I imagine is to find an autobiographical
3:02.8	connection between Dore's experiences and his work.
	...

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