Barbara Howes


Barbara Howes was an American poet.

Life

She was adopted and raised in Chestnut Hill, attending Beaver Country Day School. She graduated from Bennington College in 1937. She edited the literary magazine Chimera from 1943 to 1947 and lived in Greenwich Village. In 1947 she married the poet William Jay Smith and had two sons, David and Gregory. After divorcing in "the mid-1960s", she lived in Pownal, Vermont.
In 1971, she signed a letter protesting proposed cuts to the School of the Arts, Columbia University.
Her work was published in: Atlantic, Chicago Review, New Directions, New Republic, New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Saturday Review, Southern Review, University of Kansas Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Yale Review.

Awards

Works

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Poetry

  • Moving, Elysian Press, 1983.
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Fiction

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Editor

The Road Commissioner and Other Stories, illustrated by Gregory Smith, Stinehour Press, 1983.

Anthologies

New Poems by American Poets, Ballantine, 1957Modern Verse in English, Macmillan, 1958Modern American Poetry, Harcourt, 1962Poet's Choice, Dial, 1962Modern Poets, McGraw, 1963Of Poetry and Power, Basic Books, 1964The Girl in the Black Raincoat, edited by George Garrett, Duell, Sloane & Pierce, 1966The Marvelous Light, edited by Helen Plotz, Crowell, 1970Inside Outer Space, edited by Robert Vas Dias, Anchor Books, 1970.

Reviews

Reading the Collected Poems, one sees Howes very clearly as a woman writing in one of the oddest but most important traditions of American poetry. Howes stands with Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and ultimately Emily Dickinson in a lineage of women writers passionately committed to the independence and singularity of the poetic imagination.. They form an eccentric but eminent sorority.