Two-Part Inventions: Poems

In a series of dramatic encounters, "each in two voices and each developing a single idea," as Grove's Dictionary of Music defines the form of his title, Richard Howard has exemplified something like the artistic conscience of a generation - from 1882 to 1912. The mission of an Edith Wharton bearing the ashes of her beloved to a cemetery in Versailles, the return of an Ibsen to Capri to find his last play and an early romance - such situations, reflective at times, at times runaway, are charged with the intensity of an old tale, a new piece of gossip. These encounters concern celebrated figures and fictive celebrities, articulated in moments of crucial revelation, as even the casual is found to be a crucial revelation, as even the casual is found to be crucial at certain points of a life, a death.