Robert Guy Howarth

Robert Guy Howarth (10 May 1906 — 21 January 1974) was an Australian scholar, literary critic and poet.

Early life Howarth was born in Tenterfield, New South Wales, on 10 May 1906, the son of Australian-born parents, his father being a school teacher.

He was educated at Fort Street High School, the University of Sydney (BA, 1929), where he won first-class honours, the medal in English and the Wentworth travelling fellowship. He then studied at Oxford University (B.Litt., 1931), where he specialised in seventeenth-century poetry, and edited and published several books between 1931 and 1933.

Awarded grants by the Commonwealth Literary Fund in 1971 and 1972 to prepare an edition of the letters of Norman Lindsay, Howarth returned to Sydney.

Expertise and publications He established a reputation as an expert in Elizabethan tragedy and Restoration comedy. He introduced modernist and contemporary writers, and Australian writers, into the curriculum. In 1939 he persuaded the Australian English Association to publish under his editorship the journal Southerly. Through his role editing Southerly, and as a literary critic for The Sydney Morning Herald, he influenced the development of Australian literature. and, with Australian poets John Thompson and Kenneth Slessor, The Penguin Book of Australian Verse (London, 1958).

The Letters of Norman Lindsay (1979) was completed by Anthony Barker.