POETRY AFTER MODERNISM

Howard, Richard (1929–2022)

Alone with America [Signed Association Copy to Ben Raeburn]

New York: Atheneum, 1969. First Edition, First Printing.
A DEFINING MAP OF POSTWAR AMERICAN POETRY
A landmark work of twentieth-century American literary criticism.

Inscribed by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and critic Richard Howard to influential independent publisher Ben Raeburn of Horizon Press: ‘For Ben who would be alone without America love [R] 9/69.’ 
The inscription captures the close intellectual and publishing relationships that sustained serious American poetry during the transformative literary culture of the 1960s.

Published at the height of postwar poetic experimentation, Alone with America presents forty-one extended essays examining the lives, voices, and artistic philosophies of major contemporary poets including Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, James Merrill, and W. S. Merwin. 
Howard approaches each poet not as a representative of literary movements but as an independent imaginative force, helping shape critical understanding of modern American verse for an entire generation.

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Black cloth binding with silver spine titles. Octavo, 9.5 inches tall. xiii, [1], 2–594 pages including bibliography of authors. Hardcover with original dust jacket. First Edition, First Printing.

CONDITION: No flaws or blemishes beyond minimal shelf handling. Dust jacket bright with only slight edge toning at the crown. Interior fresh and unmarked apart from the author’s inscription. An exceptionally well-preserved copy, still gift quality. Signed and inscribed by Richard Howard to Ben Raeburn on the front endpaper.

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE —
Richard Howard was among the defining poet-critics and translators of the twentieth century, awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His criticism helped shape the canon of modern American poetry during a period of enormous literary transition.

Ben Raeburn, founder of Horizon Press, played a central role in publishing avant-garde and modernist voices in postwar America. This association copy reflects the interconnected network of writers, editors, and independent publishers that sustained serious literary culture outside purely academic institutions.

Alone with America became one of the most influential single-volume studies of contemporary American poetry produced in the postwar era. Howard combines close reading, literary biography, psychological insight, and philosophical reflection in essays that helped define the reception of confessional, experimental, and emerging poetic voices during the 1960s.

Rather than organizing poets into rigid schools or movements, Howard treats each writer as an individual artistic consciousness confronting isolation, identity, memory, politics, and language. This approach helped legitimize poets who were still considered controversial or marginal within academic criticism at the time of publication.

The inscription to Ben Raeburn further anchors the book within the independent literary culture that connected poets, critics, editors, translators, and publishers across New York’s mid-century intellectual world.

SUBJECTS: Richard Howard, Ben Raeburn, Horizon Press, postwar American poetry, literary criticism, confessional poetry, modern American poets, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, James Merrill, signed association copies, twentieth-century criticism, independent publishing, contemporary poetry studies, Literary Criticism, Poetry Studies, Modern American Literature, Association Copies

Item #21219

Price: $275.00