On having been a precocious child: “Of course, what precocity gave, socialization took away, and I hope the rather nasty designation ‘precocious child’ faded away before (at least!) adolescence.”

. . . wanting to build up my
                  imaginary figure with every
                      scrap I could find, when

Late in this cruel season when the sun
scourges alike the city and the fields,
parching the stubble and sinking into slums

Gentle reader, being—as you are—
a cautious man of uncorrupted tastes,
lay aside this disobliging work,

You used to be jealous of our old nurse
who sleeps, warm heart and all, beneath the sod.
We ought to bring her flowers, even so.

Have you felt—I have—a pain that you enjoyed?
Do they say about you, too: “How strange he is!”
—I was dying, and a special agony

I prize the memory of naked ages when
Apollo relished gilding marble limbs
whose agile-fleshed originals achieved

Two warriors have engaged in combat: swords
Hash and clash together; blood is spilled.
Such passages of arms are the result

Remember, my soul, the thing we saw
  that lovely summer day?
On a pile of stones where the path turned off,

It is a terrible terrain
   no mortal eye has seen
whose image still seduces me

Behave, my Sorrow! let’s have no more scenes.
Evening’s what you wanted—Evening’s here:
a gradual darkness overtakes the town,

Once, indulgent lady—only once
  you lay your lustrous arm
on mine (against the darkness of my soul

Worshipped once, discreetly, by our sires
as Cynthia, the lamp of secret haunts,
and still attended through blue landscapes by

Ecstatic fleece that ripples to your nape
and reeks of negligence in every curl!
To people my dim cubicle tonight

Pascal had his abyss, it followed him.
But the abyss is All—action and dream,
language, desire!—and who could count the times

Dreams come now, bad dreams, and teenage boys
burrow into their pillows. Now the lamp
that glowed at midnight seems, like a bloodshot eye,

No chest of drawers crammed with documents,
love-letters, wedding-invitations, wills,
a lock of someone’s hair rolled up in a deed,

My darling was naked, or nearly, for knowing my heart
she had left on her jewels, the bangles and chains
whose jingling music gave her the conquering air

The sun is all very well when it rises—then
who minds returning its abrupt salute?
But fortunate the man who still can find

It is a legacy of Tuscan skill;
see how the holy sisters, Power and Grace,
sustain this woman’s beauty in a form

Stupidity, delusion, selfishness and lust
torment our bodies and possess our minds,
and we sustain our affable remorse

      Anything but rotten, such flowers are ill 
named, remaining exempt from the compost fate 
      by a decorum of fatigue, keeping still 

It is the movement that disturbs the line,
      Thickening the form,
      Turning into warm

Wandering with you the shore
Which parallels our river
Like a second thought,

Earlier today, we announced that Richard Howard will receive The Paris Review’s 2017 Hadada Award. To celebrate, we’re sharing “On Tour,” a poem by Howard from our Summer 1956 issue. It is the movement that disturbs the line.
    Thickening the …

After forty-five years, as W.S. Merwin says, "the sentence continues." Here are a sheaf of poems from some of the original contributors to The Paris Review, which may serve--though many more of the original contributors are still writing poems--to inscribe upon the tablets of memory a certain continuity, a certain faith. 

So disparate, so distinct, even, are the new poems, the new poets who appear in all their multitudes in the office mail, so docile in their return-addressed envelopes yet so indubitable in their variety and delicacy that it would be defamatory for the poetry editor to claim more, in a generalizing way, about this particular clutch of poems than his own taste, his own delight in their particular virtues, their singular vitalities.

The great works are ageless, but their translations date; indeed, as Walter Benjamin remarks, the subsequent translations of great works mark their stages of continued life.