He was born in Cleveland and educated at Columbia University and the Sorbonne. Currently University Professor of English at the University of Houston and poetry editor of The Paris Review, he is also a distinguished translator and critic.

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He has translated more than 150 books by French authors--including Charles Baudelaire, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and Roland Barthes--and he has written incisive accounts of contemporary American poets, collected in Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 (1969). But his own searching and witty poetry is his most significant contribution to the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

Howard's first two books, Quantities (1962) and The Damages (1967), composed of original lyrics in several forms, translations, and imitations, are the work of a sophisticated and introspective young man, prematurely old and preoccupied with aging. In these poems, which evince the influence of W. H. Auden and Marcel Proust, Howard is obsessed with personal loss and public malaise, themes that also recur in the more ambitious later works.

Howard's third volume, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Untitled Subjects (1969), marks an important turning point in his career. A collection of fifteen dramatic monologues, letters, and journal entries whose subjects are nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century personages, actual and imaginary, famous and obscure, Untitled Subjects established Howard's reputation as an authentic successor to Robert Browning in his understanding of character and in his evocation of the past to illuminate the present. Although manipulating the voices of others, his concerns are not merely historical, but contemporary and personal.

Howard's fourth book, Findings (1971), consists of dramatic monologues and more obviously personal poems in which he continues to speak as a poet of "otherness." In his fifth collection, Two-Part Inventions (1974), he expands the dramatic monologue into dialogue and returns to the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries for his subjects.

Fellow Feelings (1976) is a miscellaneous collection of lyrics, some in Howard's own voice and some in the personae of fellow feelers, poets and painters, many of whom are gay. Misgivings (1979), Lining Up (1984), No Traveller (1989), and Like Most Revelations (1994) similarly combine poems spoken in Howard's own voice with poems spoken by historical personages, though in these later collections the figures are more apt to be French or Greek than English.

Howard's persistent themes are those of identity, existential loneliness, and the losses exacted by time. Homosexuality, which he defines as not a problem but a solution, is a significant and continuing thread that runs through all the books.

Whether expressed in the more intimate early poems, such as "DO IT AGAIN: Didactic Stanzas" from The Damages, or in the historical dialogues such as "Wildflowers" from Two-Part Inventions, which stunningly recreates the meeting between Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde in Camden in 1882, homosexuality is a recurrent motif.

In "Decades," from Fellow Feelings, Howard locates himself within a tradition of homosexual poetry in America, clasping hands with Whitman and Hart Crane. In other poems, he pays tribute to Auden, who functioned for him as a poetic father and prior ego.

Other noteworthy poems with gay subject matter include "The Giant on Giant-Killing" from Fellow Feelings, which retells the David and Goliath story from the perspective of a love-smitten giant; the meditation "On Hearing Your Lover Is Going to the Baths Tonight" from Lining Up; and, from Like Most Revelations, "What Word Did the Greeks Have for It" and the extraordinary contrapuntal dialogue, "Man Who Beat Up Homosexuals Reported to Have AIDS Virus."

Howard's identification of himself with fellow feelers, especially gay artists, enables him simultaneously to affirm and escape the self.

After Stonewall, gay male literature became focused as a movement, aided by the development of gay newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies and the founding of serious gay and lesbian bookstores.

Perhaps no other book has been more influential--for better or worse--in determining the construction of gay and lesbian identity in the modern world, as well as social attitudes toward homosexuality, than the Bible.

Like other minority groups, gay men and lesbians have had to develop both a particular sense of humor among themselves in order to make their marginal social status endurable and also a defensive awareness toward the rest of the world in order to disarm their adversaries with laughter.

The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.

It is not surprising, since the Bible insists that David be looked at and admired, that he should emerge in Western art as the incarnation of male physical attractiveness, especially as rendered by Michelangelo.

One of the most accomplished poets of the twentieth century, W. H. Auden found that his gayness led him to new insights into the universal impulse to love and enlarged his understanding of all kinds of relationships.

Allen Barnett wrote stories unlikely to be surpassed for their depiction of gay life at the height of the AIDS pandemic.

French semiotician Roland Barthes argued that the reintroduction of the sentimentality of love into sexuality would be the ultimate transgression.

Baudelaire was among the first French poets to include lesbians as subjects.

An outspoken homosexual, Jean Cocteau was a prolific poet, novelist, critic, essayist, artist, and filmmaker.

A successor to Walt Whitman, Hart Crane found spiritual transcendence in homoerotic desire.

An American-born Israeli, Robert Friend was both an accomplished poet in his own right and also an exceptionally skillful translator of poetry from many different languages.

André Gide, one of the premier French writers of the twentieth century, reflected his homosexuality in many of his numerous works.

Poet J. D. McClatchy, Jr., a master of traditional poetic forms, most notably the sonnet and sonnet sequence, ranks as a significant voice in contemporary American letters.

Marcel Proust is the author of A la recherche du temps perdu, one of the major achievements of Modernism and a great gay novel.

Celebrating an ideal of manly love in both its spiritual and physical aspects, Walt Whitman has exerted a profound and enduring influence on gay literature.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.