According to Edmund White, Moss was a closeted homosexual,[3] a notion exploited in White's thinly disguised roman à clef, The Farewell Symphony, in which the character "Tom" is a prominent New York poetry editor;[4] the "closet" characterization is at odds with the memory of literary friends who remember Moss as openly gay. Moss died of a heart attack.
Bibliography
Poetry
The Wound and the Weather (1946)
The Toy Fair (1954)
A Swimmer in the Air (1957)
A Winter Come, A Summer Gone: Poems, 1946–1960 (1960)
Ned Rorem's King Midas: a cantata for voice(s) and piano on ten poems of Howard Moss[5] (1961) is one of several settings of Moss's poetry by American composers. Allen Shearer composed his cantata King Midas (1990)[6] on the same set of poems with addition of ancient texts. Morten Lauridsen's A Winter Come[7] (1967) is a setting of six poems of Howard Moss for high voice and piano, while Francis Thorne's Nature Studies: Three Poems of Howard Moss[8] (1981) is for mezzo-soprano, flute and harp.