[In the following excerpted review, Bromwich says that Nemerov's The Western Approaches exhibits influences from William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden, and Robert Frost.]

Since his entrance in the late 1940s into the ranks of the then reigning Auden school, Howard Nemerov has been a poet of many voices, most of them effective and some of them his own. In a penetrating review of Mr. Nemerov's third volume, The Salt Garden, Jarrell remarked—only half-sorrowfully, because half-admiringly—“the specter which is haunting this particular book: middle and late Yeats; you find half of Yeats's pet words and rhythms, his rhetorical use of the word maybe, even. And whenever Mr. Nemerov sees a gull he starts to sound like ‘The Wild Swans at Coole.’” The reviewer noticed what a queer fact it seemed “that the poet should need or wish to consent to this much help this late.” And he reserved for an overall summary of the book a high though highly ambivalent compliment: that the reader tends to think, in trying to account for Mr. Nemerov's fluent and familiar-seeming manner, “Yes, a lot of good English poetry feels like this.” But Mr. Nemerov's finest poems have always had a peculiar freshness, a buoyancy and a hush all their own: in “Runes,” a quiet meditative lyric that ought to survive any change of fashion, and in The Blue Swallows, his most elegantly sustained volume, Mr. Nemerov placed himself among the few poets of his generation identifiably blessed with a character. Yet it has to be allowed that his connection with poetic tradition is strongly visible and at times uneasily specific, from Auden to Yeats.

And now to Frost. Because the typical poem in The Western Approaches is a poem that takes its verbal energy, its motive and moral, from the air one first breathed in Frost, generally late Frost. Mr. Nemerov opens his book with these lines:

You see them vanish in their speeding cars,
The many people hastening through the world,
And wonder what they would have done before
This time of time speed distance, random streams
Of molecules hastened by what rising heat?
Was there never a world where people just sat still?

And if the feel of those lines, their whole atmosphere and accustomed weight, is not enough to prompt a smile of recognition, look at how Frost chose to begin “Pod of the Milkweed”:

Calling all butterflies of every race
From source unknown but from no special place
They ever will return to all their lives,
Because unlike the bees they have no hives,
The milkweed brings up to my very door
The theme of wanton waste in peace and war
As it has never been to me before.

The greed and speed of the destruction, with “mingled butterfly and flower dust” telling the tale, is Frost's theme, so that he permits himself only the consolation of a truthful reckoning that “waste was of the essence of the scheme.” And that is Mr. Nemerov's conclusion, as he looks, with the hard look of a naturalist, at the life before him on the highway, where people in their cars are “all facing to the front / Which is the future, which is destiny, / Which is desire and desire's end— / What are they doing but just sitting still?” The essence of the scheme is terrible, and not to be denied: “And still at speed they fly away, as still / As the road paid out beneath them as it flows / Moment by moment into the mirrored past.”

This is a small illustration. In fact, hardly a nature poem in the book—many of its best poems are about trees and seasons—can be read without some shake of the head: one is seeing double. “The Consent” has to do with the fall of leaves from ginkgo trees, suddenly, in a single night. “If this,” asks the poet, “Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt? / What use to learn the lessons taught by time, / If a star at any time may tell us: Now.” One trusts these lines, from the second and generalizing stanza, since the first has provided a cue with exquisite description. Nevertheless, the poem strikes one as a footnote to “Spring Pools”: as do many others in this volume.

But I realize that I have begun to sound grudging, and that is not what I meant at all. “Every idiom has its idiot,” a wise man observed. Few are lucky enough to have an employer as nimble as Mr. Nemerov. His dealings with his own latest idiom are sometimes, indeed, so intelligent that his poems become a second nature to Frost's. To learn something new in an old language is of course to learn something new. Here and there, it is true, Mr. Nemerov likes to play with words, to play the words like an instrument, to have his way with them; in his epigrams—which I do not especially care for—he only seems fierce; what drives him, as a rule, in his unhappiest moments, is a free-floating nervous energy, the need to behold a thriving creation of lines joking at each other or words joking within a line, to make a more impressive tension from what started as a tic. But, in any case, he errs on the side of plenitude. Over large stretches of The Western Approaches Mr. Nemerov resumes activity as the very serious and very American poet who emerged in The Blue Swallows—whatever he finds useful to keep himself going is useful to his readers—and we are simply grateful to have him among us.

I want to end by quoting a poem which, despite some Yeatsian touches, no one except this poet could have managed. Its title is “Hero with Girl and Gorgon”; its subject, the endless knowledge and responsibility that heroism incurs, whether in the clash of swords or of words:

Child of the sunlight in the tower room,
When you have carried away Medusa's head,
When you have slain the dragon in the sea
And brought the maiden breathing from the rock
To be the bride, consider, wingéd man,
The things that went before and what things else
Must follow, when in the land beyond the North
The grey hags sang to you, the three grey hags
Sharing an eye and a tooth, dim-glimmering in
White darkness, sang to you their songs of how
The things that were surpass the things that are …
As though the vision from that time reversed,
As in the glitter of the shield the sword
Cut backward in aversion from the cold
Brow's beauty and the wide unpitying gaze …
And now you must go onward through the world
With that great head swung by the serpents held
At lantern height before you, lighting your way
Past living images that mock or curse,
Till paralyzed to silence in the stone
They run unmoved on your undying doom.