Henri Coulette in 1965. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Operative words Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. It is a great irony that Henri Coulette, a poet of remarkable refinement and exquisite formal control—the son, no less, of a gifted musician—suffered from such terrible timing. Part of a cohort at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1950s that included Philip Levine, W. D.