A Progressive Education: Poems

How extraordinary that the only poetry collection devoted to the trials and tribulations of an entire class of sixth graders is written by the eighty-five-year-old MacArthur Grant and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Howard! Although loosely based on the poet’s own progressive education in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1940s, the poems are set mostly in the present day. Richard Howard is a poet of personality, of history, and of a sensibility rooted in knowledge. In his fifteenth collection, Howard captivates the reader as he and the class grapple with science and literature, teacher and principal, and the hard facts and comic fancies of life itself.