A lauded American poet’s tributes to Walt Whitman and Henry James, now collected for the first time.

Richard Howard is widely recognized as one of America’s finest poets, and he has been especially celebrated for his sparkling and trenchant dramatic monologues based on the lives of historical figures. Howard’s monologues have brought to life the voices of all sorts of different people, but two of his favorite subjects are two of his favorite writers–Walt Whitman and Henry James–and at the heart of this book are the numerous poems he has devoted to these great forebears, which are gathered here in a single volume for the first time. Howard’s angles of approach are always unexpected- he shows us Whitman reckoning with Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde; Henry James trying to make sense of Los Angeles, where he is being set up for lunch with L. Frank Baum; and much more. Howard’s monologues are above all inspired and revelatory dialogues, as expansive and celebratory as Walt Whitman and as subtly inquiring as Henry James.