Henri Coulette

Henri Coulette was an educator, editor, and poet best known for his traditionally metered poetry. He was born in Los Angeles, Calfornia, and he earned a BA from California State University in Los Angeles in 1952. He then studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He taught English at California State University in Los Angeles for almost 30 years.

Coulette’s first volume of poetry, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems (1966), won the Lamont Poetry Prize and received significant critical attention. Coulette was described as “a poet to watch” by Dudley Fitts in the New York Times Book Review. Discussing the title poem in Coulette’s collection The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems, Fitts claimed to be “frustrated throughout [this poem] by opacities of allusion and reference.” However, he also praised it: “Isolated passages show power. The poem is skillfully written.” And Mother Mary Anthony wrote in Western Humanities Review that The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems is “work of a high order—disciplined originality and strong patterning, layered irony and powerful understatement.”

Coulette’s other poetry collections are The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette, edited by Donald Justice and Robert Mezey (1990), published posthumously, and The Family Goldschmitt (1971). He also edited Character and Crisis: A Contemporary Reader (1966), The Unstrung Lyre: Interviews With Fourteen Poets (1965), and Midland: Twenty-five Years of Fiction and Poetry From Writing Workshops of the State University of Iowa (1961).

He died in South Pasadena, California, on March 26, 1988.