Howard Baker (poet)

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Howard Baker (1905-1990) was an American poet, dramatist, and literary critic.

Baker was born in Philadelphia. He did graduate work in English at Stanford University, where he befriended Yvor Winters and was co-editor of the literary magazine Gyroscope. After getting his master's degree, he moved to Paris to pursue his studies at the Sorbonne. There he married the novelist Dorothy Baker and met and was influenced by Ernest Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford, who helped him to publish his first work, the autobiographical novel Orange Valley (1931). After returning to the United States in 1931, he took a position teaching English at Berkeley. From 1937 to 1943 he taught English at Harvard. Besides collaborations with his wife, his writings include the poetry collections Letter from the Country (1941) and Ode to the Sea (1954), as well as a collection of essays on ancient Greek culture, Persephone's Cave: Cultural Accumulations of the Early Greeks (1979).