Howard Moss

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.

He is credited with discovering a number of major American poets, including Anne Sexton and Amy Clampitt.

[2] W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman co-wrote a famously concise clerihew in his honor: Is Robert Lowell Better than Noël Coward, Howard?

According to Edmund White, Moss was a closeted homosexual,[3] 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;[4] the "closet" characterization is at odds with the memory of literary friends who remember Moss as openly gay.

Allen Shearer composed his cantata King Midas (1990)[6] on the same set of poems with addition of ancient texts.