Introduction
Howard Moss (January 22, 1922 – September 16, 1987) was an American poet, dramatist and critic. He was poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine from 1948 until his death and he won the National Book Award in 1972 for Selected Poems.
Biography
Moss was born in New York City. He attended the University of Michigan, where he won a Hopwood Award. He is credited with discovering a number of major American poets, including Anne Sexton and Amy Clampitt.
W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman co-wrote a famously concise clerihew in his honor:
- TO THE POETRY EDITOR OF THE NEW YORKER
Is Robert Lowell
Better than Noël
Coward,
Howard?
According to Edmund White, Moss was a closeted homosexual, a notion exploited in White's thinly disguised roman à clef, The Farewell Symphony, in which the character "Tom" is a prominent New York poetry editor; the "closet" characterization is at odds with the memory of literary friends who remember Moss as openly gay. Moss died of a heart attack related to AIDS.