Howard Moss

• Born: January 22, 1922
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: September 16, 1987
• Place of death: New York, New York

Other literary forms

Like many other contemporary poets, Howard Moss experimented with drama. His play The Folding Green was first performed in 1954 by the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and again, in 1965, in a workshop production by the Playwrights’ Unit of Theater 1965. The Oedipus Mah-Jongg Scandal was performed in 1968 by the Cooperative Theatre Club in New York. A third play, The Palace at 4 A.M., was given a staged reading by the Playwrights’ Unit in New York in 1972. Both The Palace at 4 A.M. and The Folding Green were published in 1980. In addition to drama, Moss published a critical study, The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust (1962), and three collections of criticism: Writing Against Time: Critical Essays and Reviews (1969), Whatever Is Moving (1981), and Minor Monuments: Selected Essays (1986); the last discusses the work of writers ranging from Gustave Flaubert to Anton Chekhov to Katherine Anne Porter. In 1974, he published Instant Lives, satirical biographies illustrated by Edward Gorey. Moss was also editor of Keats (1959), The Nonsense Books of Edward Lear (1964), The Poet’s Story (1973), and New York (1980).

Achievements

Although widely respected for his poetry, Howard Moss is perhaps better known for having been the poetry editor of The New Yorker. After 1950, when he assumed that post, his careful editorial judgment and clearheaded vision helped to construct the environment of taste, wit, and sensibility in which many of the well-known poets writing in the English language in the latter half of that century developed and matured. Moss opened the pages of The New Yorker to a rich and diverse flow of poetic talent: John Updike and David Ray, Elizabeth Bishop and Mark Strand, David Wagoner and Donald Justice, W. S. Merwin and Dave Smith, Philip Levine and Charles Simic. The list is long and impressive and could be extended almost indefinitely. Moss is one of a handful of influential editors and craftsmen who helped give shape and direction to the flow of poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Moss’s poetry is characterized by a lucid, often ironic voice; by evocative images; and by sure, sensitive, rhythmical language. His major concerns remained almost unchanged after they were first voiced in The Wound and the Weather: the passage of time, the paradox of change and permanence, the acceptance of loss and gain (of friends, of beauty, of love, of life). His own influences seem clearly marked: Wallace Stevens (visible in Moss’s wordplay and in his sometimes extravagant language) and W. H. Auden (noted chiefly in Moss’s carefully controlled music and in his ironic wit).

As a critic, Moss varied in his approach—from detailed New Critical textual analysis to purely subjective response. “I distrust,” he said, “all theses and theories about writing, and dislike the idea of ’schools’ of writing, both in the traditional and in the educational sense.”

Moss received Poetry’s Janet Sewall David Award in 1944, the Brandeis Creative Award in 1962, an Avery Hopwood Award in 1963, an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968, a National Book Award in Poetry in 1972 (for Selected Poems), the Brandeis University Citation in Poetry in 1983, another National Endowment for the Arts Award in 1984, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1986 for “distinguished poetic achievement,” and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1986. In 1957 and 1964, he was a judge for the National Book Awards. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1971 and served as chancellor for the Academy of American Poets in 1987.

Widely respected both as a critic and as a craftsman, Moss provided his contemporaries with a level of accomplishment difficult to surpass. Perhaps his dominant strength was his single vision: his dependence on intellect rather than emotion. That vision of art enabled him to keep the welter of life “just under control.”

Biography

Howard Moss was the son of David and Sonya (Schrag) Moss. When he was still a young child, his grandfather and grandmother were brought over from “the old country”—Lithuania. As a consequence, Moss writes, “I grew up in a middle-class community but was really under the care of my two grandparents, who were of another flavor unmistakably.” In spite of this background, Moss was one of an increasing number of contemporary poets identified with the city and with urban life. Much of his poetry concerns itself with the metropolis—with New York City—both its moments of beauty and its moments of bleakness.

After attending public school and high school in Belle Harbor, New York, Moss studied at the University of Michigan from 1939 to 1940, then transferred to the University of Wisconsin, where he received his B.A. degree in 1944. Other formal education included a summer at Harvard University in 1942 and postgraduate work at Columbia University in 1946.

After college, Moss worked for one year (1944) for Time magazine as a copy boy and, later, as a book reviewer. Following a short period with the Office of War Information, he was an English instructor at Vassar College for two years, served one year as fiction editor of Junior Bazaar, and, finally, joined the editorial staff of The New Yorker in 1948. He was poetry editor for the magazine until his death in 1987 at the age of sixty-five.

Analysis

One of the definitions of a poem, Howard Moss wrote, is that it “keeps the welter of life, the threat of disorientation, just under control. . . .” This sense of uneasy balance—of order poised at the edge of chaos—informs Moss’s editorial, critical, and poetic judgment.

As an editor, Moss established himself as one of the influential figures in American letters during the second half of the twentieth century. His strength as an editor derived primarily from his single vision of art: a dependence on wit and intellect rather than on spontaneity and emotion. He once said, “Though I respect and sometimes envy spontaneity in writing, I revise my work a great deal.” The poems that appeared in The New Yorker during Moss’s tenure as poetry editor reveal how clearly Moss transmitted his own vision of poetry to other poets.

As a critic, Moss’s interests were far-ranging—from Proust to John Keats to William Shakespeare to Jean Stafford. In his major work of criticism, The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust, Moss organized the structure and content of Marcel Proust’sÀ la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931) around four metaphysical concepts: gardens, windows, parties, and steeples. Although the book received mixed reviews, Moss was praised for his vivid and lucid writing. The pieces collected in Whatever Is Moving continued to illustrate Moss’s wide range of critical interests: Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Anton Chekhov, and Elizabeth Bishop. In “The First Line,” Moss presents a perceptive and original investigation into the different ways poets have used first lines to launch a poem.

Early collections

As a poet, Moss’s reputation grew slowly but steadily over a long and productive period, beginning in 1944, when he received the Janet Sewall David Award from Poetry. One criticism of his first collection, The Wound and the Weather, was that the poems relied heavily on abstraction. He was recognized, however, for his skill with language, his consistency of metaphor, and his adherence to formal and traditional structures and values. The Wound and the Weather adumbrated many of Moss’s continuing concerns: the urban setting, the preoccupation with loss, the awareness of time. The next two collections, The Toy Fair and A Swimmer in the Air, showed Moss’s progress as a poet in both technique and subject matter. Howard Nemerov called The Toy Fair “one of the most accomplished collections of lyric poetry since the war” (The Atlantic Monthly, September, 1954).

A Winter Come, A Summer Gone

In his fourth book, A Winter Come, A Summer Gone, Moss presented, in addition to fourteen new poems, a selection of the best work from his three previous volumes—poems embodying those characteristics which have come to be associated with his poetry. The two title poems, “A Winter Come” and “A Summer Gone,” are excellent examples. Both poems have the same formal structure: ten stanzas of eight lines each, shaped by an iambic pentameter rhythm, with a basically regular rhyme scheme. In each, the voice is that of the first-person singular; it is a predominantly lyric voice but muted with what Moss has called, in another context, a “delicious undertone” of regret, “the way nostalgia can be redeeming or the sadness of fall pleasurable.”

In “A Winter Come,” the first eight stanzas sketch brief, telling vignettes of the winter season: the wind-blown leaves, the stiffened boughs, the landscape blurred with snow, the insubstantial clouds of breath on winter air, footprints of birds on “a scroll of white,” frozen waterfalls, and snow-covered statues. The next-to-last stanza, with its metaphor of fire as “the end of words,” turns the poem on the axis of ambiguity: “By ambiguity/ We make of flame a word that flame can burn,/ And of love a stillness.” The last stanza returns the poem to its now reshaped locus of winter and the bittersweet truth that “icy wind makes young blood sweet/ In joining joy, which age can never have./ And that is what all old men know of love.”

In “A Summer Gone,” the first two stanzas create a vivid image of the late summer seaside: “stilts/ Of slipshod timber,” spiral shells, “now empty of their hosts.” The next three stanzas directly address the listener, asserting, finally, “Those beautiful outsides, those thin-skinned maps/ Are part of love. Or all of it, perhaps.” Stanzas 6, 7, and 8 offer metaphors of loss—loss of sight, of sound, of touch. The two final stanzas turn back to the loss of summer and look ahead to “Sad fall,” colored by a thousand dyings. As in “A Winter Come,” the last image is that of love: “The view/ To take is but another wintry one,/ To wait for the new nestings of the sun.”

The 1960’s

In the 1960’s, Moss both widened his range of poetic techniques and probed more deeply into his constant theme of loss and deprivation. Finding Them Lost, and Other Poems received widespread critical acceptance. Moss said in an interview for the New York Quarterly that he was trying in this collection to change from his “usual methods.” Particularly successful examples of this change were a group of poems called “Lifelines”—“attempts to get certain people I knew down on paper.” In Second Nature, Moss essayed, in poems such as “Sands” and “Front Street,” a more conversational line, approaching free verse. The sure choice of language and the ever-increasing concreteness of image, however, remained characteristic strengths of his poetry. The Selected Poems pulled together the strongest of his earlier verse, complemented by seven previously uncollected poems. The collection, a National Book Award winner, illustrated Moss’s increasing understanding of his craft and validated his own definition of poetry as that form that “focuses, compresses, intensifies.”

Buried City

Buried City reinforced Moss’s stature as a poet and revealed again the depth and range of his major concerns. The images here are those of the city: In the title poem, an archaeologist from some future time examines the ruins of New York City. Two subsequent volumes, A Swim off the Rocks and Tigers and Other Lilies, turn in different directions. The former is a volume of light verse, ranging from the surreal to satiric wordplay. Tigers and Other Lilies is a book of poems for children—poems about plants with animals in their names.

Notes from the Castle

Moss’s 1979 collection, Notes from the Castle, reaffirmed the lucid voice, the sensitive music, and the evocative images that distinguish his poetry. Moss’s one constant was his commitment to the intellect to make sense of the world. In these poems, it is the mind that speaks—wisely and memorably—elegiac words: of gravel, of stars, of ideas. In “Gravel,” there is the yearning to be “made separate/ Or to be part/ Of some great thing . . ./ To be made solid.” In “Stars,” there is the haunting image of the speaker reaching up “to pluck the stars like words to make/ A line, a phrase, a stanza, a whole poem.” In “Elegy for My Sister,” one image encapsulates all the others: “What are ideas but architecture/ Taking nature to heart and sustaining/ Inviolable forms.” Although the tendency to abstraction remains, Moss moves more and more toward the concrete image. Even when the abstract occurs, the poet frequently redeems it through the use of startling language and unusual contexts.

Rules of Sleep

Rules of Sleep, Moss’s last collection of new poetry, continues his concern with time and loss as well as his uncommon use of commonplace settings or subjects. The speaker of a meditation on Albert Einstein, for example, is Einstein’s old bathrobe. Moss’s penchant for urban surroundings (and his use of contemporary speech) is exemplified by a poem set in Miami Beach in which a street is “strung out on lights.” There is anxiety in the poems’ reflections on mortality—“the chill of what is about to happen”—but there is also a wit and calmness that keeps the fear at bay: “Everything permanent,” Moss writes, “is due for a surprise.”

Bibliography

Clampitt, Amy. “Between the Lines: Rereading Harold Moss.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 15, no. 1 (1989): 340. Clampitt examines Moss’s poetry, concluding that he is undervalued as a poet.

Gioia, Dana. “The Difficult Case of Howard Moss.” Antioch Review 45 (Winter, 1987): 98-109. Although this is primarily a review of Moss’s New Selected Poetry, it also surveys the poet’s life, poetry, and career as poetry editor for The New Yorker. Gioia acknowledges that Moss’s career at The New Yorker had a largely negative impact on his poetry by robbing it of serious and sustained critical evaluations. Admirably corrects this oversight.

Howard, Richard. Alone with America. New York: Atheneum, 1980. The chapter on Moss reviews his work and illustrates the qualities that set him apart from “the many others who are merely suave or serviceable.” Among these qualities are his rhythms, his use of conceits and puns, and his contrasts of human and universal order. Howard writes in a lean style and includes passages from major Moss works to illustrate his key points.

“Howard Moss.” The New Yorker, October 5, 1987, p. 128. The obituary that appeared in the magazine for which Moss served as an editor for many years describes his life, career, and work at the magazine.

Malkoff, Karl. Crowell’s Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973. A succinct and informative overview of Moss and his poetic technique, which includes a description of Moss’s stylistic evolution illustrated with a contrast between “Elegy for My Father” and “Arsenic.” Malkoff suggests the poet’s work is best reviewed using the methods of New Criticism and provides the reader with a select bibliography.

Moss, Howard. “Howard Moss: An Interview.” Interview by Robert Leiter. American Poetry Review 13 (September/October, 1984): 27-31. Leiter’s important interview provides essential information about and by Moss, including his experience as a professor at Vassar College and as a poetry editor at The New Yorker. Moss discusses the mechanics of poetry editing, composition, and structure, and in the process reveals the criteria he uses in writing and editing his own work.

St. John, David. “Scripts and Water, Rules and Riches.” Antioch Review 43 (Summer, 1985): 309-319. St. John asserts that Moss wrote “some of the most powerful and moving poems” of the last years of the twentieth century. He argues his case by citing a variety of Moss’s works, including Rules of Sleep, Buried City, and Notes from the Castle. The beauty, emotion, and musical quality of Moss’s works are illustrated with extensive passages from these and other poems.