ABSTRACT
Kenneth Koch was a poet of avant-garde rupture, and Richard Howard is a poet of literary rapprochement—or so most critical accounts assume. These close contemporaries tend to be placed on opposite ends of a poetic spectrum, representative figures in opposing coteries. In the early fifties, Howard was part of "a circle of poets and readers at Columbia" that included John Hollander and Robert Gottlieb, and whose efforts involved work on The Columbia Review and publication in The Hudson Review, Poetry, and The New Yorker. Howard remembers in an interview that Auden "was a feature in our landscape," as were their teachers, Lionel Trilling and F. W. Dupee, and he stresses that "we were, as I say, very literary" (Interview 39). In these same years, the yet-to-be-named New York School poets challenged an uptown aesthetic with a downtown one, rejecting the dominant literary climate in which, as Koch put it years later, "One hardly dared to wink / Or fool around in any way in poems" (Great 310). 1 As Frank O'Hara described them, he and his friends were "non-Academic and indeed non-literary poets in the sense of the American scene at the time [...]" (Collected 512). They allied themselves with the art world, edited the avant-garde magazine Locus Solus, and openly criticized the work of the other crowd. In "Fresh Air" (1956), Koch's tirade against academic verse, the "Strangler" seeks out and murders "makers of comparisons / Between football and life," "students of myth," and poets who address their poems "to personages no longer living / Even in anyone's thoughts [...]" (72—3). 2 Howard, in light of this last indictment, had cause to fear. He exemplified the kind of poet Koch opposed—"[c]ivilized, verbally excellent, ironic, cerebral and clearly [a bearer] of the Tradition" (Carroll 204). Fifty years later, these differences continue to shape these poets' receptions. Fans of avant-garde poetry praise Koch's inventive and exuberant language, his openness to popular culture, and his irreverence. Fans of the lyric tradition praise Howards eloquence and intellectual depth, his nuanced measures, and his allusive range.
