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Critical Survey of Poetry Nemerov, Howard Other literary forms Though known primarily for his poetry, Howard Nemerov wrote novels–The Melodramatists (1949), Federigo: Or, The Power of Love (1954), and The Homecoming Game (1957)—and short stories, collected in A Commodity of Dreams and Other Stories (1959) and Stories, Fables, and Other Diversions (1971). Two verse dramas, Endor and Cain, are included with his collection The Next Room of the Dream. His criticism and reflections on the making of poetry are to be found in various volumes: Poetry and Fiction: Essays (1963), Reflexions on Poetry and Poetics (1972), Figures of Thought: Speculations on the Meaning of Poetry and Other Essays (1978), New and Selected Essays (1985), and The Oak in the Acorn: On “Remembrance of Things Past” and on Teaching Proust, Who Will Never Learn (1987). Journal of the Fictive Life is a series of candid autobiographical meditations. Achievements As a poet, novelist, critic, and teacher, Howard Nemerov was a man of letters in the eighteenth century tradition. He was identified with no particular school of poetry. In the pamphlet Howard Nemerov (1968), Peter Meinke says that Nemerov’s work explores the dilemma of “the existential, science-oriented (or science-displaced) liberal mind of the twentieth century.” Almost every available award came to Nemerov; his honors included the Bowdoin Prize from Harvard University (1940), a Kenyon Review fellowship in fiction (1955), a National Institute of Arts and Letters Grant (1961), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1968-1969), an Academy of American Poets fellowship (1970), the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award (1978), the Bollingen Prize from Yale University (1981), the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern Poetry (1987), and the presidential National Medal of Art (1987). He served as a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress and as the United States poet laureate from 1988 to 1990. The National Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Alpha of Massachusetts all claimed him as a member. Nemerov was the poet of the modern person. His deep division of temperament and his interest in science illustrated the fragmentation and scientific bent of the twentieth century. His sense of the tragic nature of the human condition and his spiritual questing with no subsequent answers reflected the twentieth century search for meaning. Although his poetry has a decidedly religious quality, Nemerov appeared to resolve his spiritual questions by honoring life’s mystery rather than by adopting specific beliefs. Biography Howard Nemerov was born in New York City on March 1, 1920, to David and Gertrude (Russek) Nemerov. His wealthy parents were also cultivated and saw to it that their son was well educated. They sent him first to the exclusive private Fieldston Preparatory School, where he distinguished himself as both scholar and athlete. Nemerov then entered Harvard University, where he began to write poetry, essays, and fiction. In his junior year, he won the Bowdoin Prize for an essay on Thomas Mann. Nemerov was graduated in 1937 and immediately entered the Royal Air Force Coast Command as an aviator, based in England. Subsequently, he joined the Eighth United States Army Air Force, which was based in Lincolnshire. On January 26, 1944, Nemerov was married to Margaret (Peggy) Russell (a union that Howard Nemerov (© Miriam Berkley) 2749
Nemerov, Howard Critical Survey of Poetry produced three sons, David, Alexander, and Jeremy Seth). In 1945, when he was discharged as a first lieutenant from the Air Force, the Nemerovs moved to New York City to settle into civilian life. During this time, Nemerov chose, against his father’s will, to become a poet. This was an anguished decision, for tradition decreed that, as the only son, he should carry on the family business. As a “Jewish Puritan of the middle class,” Nemerov felt keenly the separation from custom. In his Journal of the Fictive Life (1965), he credits his emphasis on work to a “guilty acknowledgment that I became a writer very much against the will of my father.” Since poetry customarily brings more pleasure than money, Nemerov left New York after a year to join the faculty at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. In 1948, he became a member of the English department of Bennington College and taught there until, in 1966, he went to Brandeis University in Massachusetts. During his stay at Brandeis, Nemerov also held interim teaching appointments. He left Brandeis in 1969 to become the Hurst Professor of Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He became Washington University’s Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor of English in 1976. He completed a writer-in-residency at the University of Missouri at Kansas City in April, 1991, shortly before his death from cancer in July. Analysis Howard Nemerov’s poetry revolves about the theme of the absurd place of humankind within the large drama of time. It also illustrates his divided temperament, about which he wrote in Journal of the Fictive Life, “I must attempt to bring together the opposed elements of my character represented by poetry and fiction.” These conflicts—the romantic-realist, the skeptic-believer, the scientist-poet—reflect the fragmentation and angst of modern existence. He did not employ scientific terms in a sentimental manner in his poetry but included nebulae, particles, and light-years as true poetic subjects, not simply metaphors for human concerns. Nemerov was a Renaissance man in his breadth and an eighteenth century man of letters in his satire, wit, and respect for form. His spiritual questions and his refusal of any orthodoxy, 2750 whether religious or artistic, made him a twentieth century existentialist. Like any great figure, however, Nemerov defied categorization. He lived his life in and for literature in an age that values, as he wrote in his Journal of the Fictive Life, “patient, minute analysis”; he gave himself to “the wholeness of things,” “the great primary human drama” in a time when some consider that loving the human story is “unsophisticated, parochial, maybe even sinful.” Many writers reach a plateau; Howard Nemerov kept growing. In his evolution, he became less bitter and more loving. As he became more complex, his language grew simpler, elegantly expressing his subtle mind and his ultimate sadness at the tragic position of humanity in the universe. Nemerov’s divided nature shows in his poetry’s empiricism and acceptance of objective reality and his subjective, poetic self that searched, perhaps futilely, for a definite Word of God. The Image and the Law and Guide to the Ruins Nemerov’s first three poetry collections, The Image and the Law, Guide to the Ruins, and The Salt Garden, demonstrate his growth from a somewhat derivative writer to a mature poet with a distinctive voice. The Image and the Law is based on his dual vision, what he called “poetry of the eye” (the image) and “poetry of the mind” (the law). He tries to illustrate the “everpresent dispute between the two ways of looking at the world.” The Image and the Law, as a first book, was competent, but was criticized for lack of unity and for being derivative. Critics found too many echoes of T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens— admittedly Nemerov’s models. Nemerov’s second book, Guide to the Ruins, drew the same complaint, as did The Salt Garden. The latter collection, however, was recognized as exhibiting the beginning of his “most characteristic voice, a quiet intelligent voice brooding lyrically on the strange beauty and tragic loneliness of life,” as Peter Meinke has described it. In The Image and the Law and Guide to the Ruins, not only is Nemerov practicing what he has learned from Yeats, Eliot, and others, but he also starts to purge himself of war-won realizations. Although The Image
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