Web posted on: Friday, April 09, 1999 4:55:50 PM

(CNN) -- Charles Rosen, winner of a 1972 National Book Award for "The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven", has been given the 1999 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin.

The award is a private prize provided for in Capote's will. This year it honors Rosen's book "Romantic Poets, Critics and Other Madmen" (Harvard University Press). The book examines Romantic poets Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, William Cowper and Friedrich Hölderlin, looking at the type of criticism that studies concealed codes in expression. It includes essays on Honoré de Balzac, Robert Schumann, Gustave Flaubert and others, in pointing up relations between Romantic art and music.

The Capote award was announced by Frank Conroy, director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and was chosen from 12 books nominated by a committee of six book critics.

"Each year the books are incredible, the best of the best," says Conroy, who's the prize administrator. The award comes with a $50,000 cash prize from the Capote estate.

"Capote cared quite a lot about the state of American literary criticism," Conroy said, "and he also wanted to honor his friend Newton Arvin" by naming the prize after him.

Rosen is a pianist and Professor Emeritus of Music and Social Thought at the University of Chicago. In addition to "The Classical Style", his previous books include "Sonata Forms" and "Romanticism and Realism" (with Henri Zerner).