SOURCE: Vendler, Helen. A review of Collected Poems. New York Times Book Review (7 December 1977): 14.

[In the following review of Nemerov's Collected Poems, Vendler points to the poet's attempts to find meaning in an unsettling world.]

When Stevens wrote about his “Collected Poems” as “The Planet on the Table,” he meant that a life's poetry, like a terrestrial globe, reproduces (though in a reduced scale) the whole world. The world as Nemerov knows it is revealed, prophetically, in the title of his first (1947) volume, The Image and the Law. The world comes to us in images; the mind seeks a law in the heterogeneous information infiltrating the senses. A late poem shows Nemerov as a boy confronting “The Book of Knowledge,” “a luxury liner on [a] sea unfathomable of ignorance,” with poetry “as steady, still, and rare / As the lighthouses now unmanned and obsolete.” These three things—our already immeasurable knowledge of the world, our nonetheless profound ignorance of its ways, and our landmarks and beacons in the productions of consciousness—are Nemerov's constant subjects:

There is the world, the dream, and the one law,
The wish, the wisdom, and things as they are.

Nemerov is chiefly a poet of “the wisdom,” “the one law”: his mind plays with epigram, gnome, riddle, rune, advice, meditation, notes, dialectic, prophecy, reflection, views, knowledge, questions, speculation—all the forms of thought. His wishes go homing to origins and ends. Any natural fact—a tree, for instance—becomes instantly symbolic in his eye's gaze: its seed summons up “mysteries of generation and death,” its trunk and branches recall “the one and the many, cause and effect, generality and particulars,” its movement from roots to trunk to branches will serve as a metaphor for “historical process,” and so on—a method by which Yeats's great-rooted blossomer becomes distinctly more Emersonian and emblematic.

However, Nemerov has struggled increasingly, in the course of his life, with his philosophical instincts, urging his poetry into moods that will accommodate fact and dream as well as wisdom. There is a touching poem (“Beginner's Guide”) that recalls his persistent, if never entirely successful, pursuit of the proper names—through bird books, flower books, tree books, star books—of things as they are, “to make some mind of what was only sense.” Nemerov is not innately hospitable to fantasy and imaginative waywardness, though his wit is elusive, mischievous and teasing. His masters in youth—Stevens, Auden, Frost and Yeats—shared in different ways his discursive and philosophic stance. He is drawn to Breughel and Klee for their allegories of dark whimsy. Nemerov's complaint to Klee might be his own self-definition:

He is the painter of the human mind
Finding and faithfully reflecting the mindfulness
That is in things, and not the things themselves.

Nemerov's paradox—“the mindfulness that is in things”—takes on flesh in his many surprising lines that make us see the obvious-but-till-now-unsaid. We have all, in the newspapers, read the engagements and the obituaries, but it remained for Nemerov to see that the papers printed “segregated photographs / Of the girls that marry and the men that die.”

Nemerov revives old American themes, equaling his predecessors on their own ground, and rivaling Dickinson and Frost as a poet of the American autumn.

Something that turns upon a hidden hinge
Brings down the dead leaf and live seed together

The “cryptically instructive” chambered nautilus becomes for him the “divine and crippled norm,” in which “A twist along the spine begins the form / And hides itself inside a twisted house.” Like Lowell, he keeps a churchless Sabbath:

Among the ashtrays in the living room
[You] breathe the greyish air left over from
Last night, and go down on your knees to read
The horrible funnies flattened on the floor.

The morose humor that pervades the Collected Poems takes its rise from Nemerov's contemplation of various grim spectacles: the will's rebellion against necessity, history's repetitions, the pitfalls of the literary life and the perpetual discrepancy between hope and event. Sometimes Nemerov's irony can itself seem contrived, a too orderly dismissal of life. But on the whole, the irony is mixed with a rueful pleasure, as Nemerov is distracted from wisdom by some natural phenomenon. He fends off his tendency to solemn periods with a jaunty colloquiality; while yearning toward his alphas and omegas, he can take time for a brilliant sketch of football players on television:

Totemic scarabs, exoskeletal,
Nipped in at the thorax, bulky
                    above and below,
With turreted hard heads and
                    jutting masks
And emblems of the lightning
                    or the beast.

The world causes in Nemerov a mingled revulsion and love, and a hopeless hope is the most attractive quality in his poems, which slowly turn obverse to reverse, seeing the permanence of change, the vices of virtue, the evanescence of solidities and the errors of truth. Dreams lie with death and mathematics, forgeries invade art museums, a green and silent cherry tree shades “the bloody stones, the rotting flesh” of its fruit, and the “translucency of leaf” of the ginkgo filters “a urinary yellow light.” The sensibility mapped by such phrases is one permanently unsettled and bent on making a law out of its unease.

As, in this volume, the echoes of the grands maîtres fade, the poems get steadily better. The severity of attitude is itself chastened by a growing humanity, and the forms of the earth grow ever more distinct, as by small increments of reality Nemerov brightens his lonely algebraic world, beset by the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. In the fall, he now notices

Acorns in neat berets, horse
                    chestnuts huge
And shiny as shoes inside
                    their spiny husks,
Prickly planets among the
                    sweet gum's starry leaves.

These noticings thread veins of life through Nemerov's ruminations: his dandelions that puff and go to seed delicately ornament, like fanciful illuminations, his sterner text. If the ravens of unresting thought (as Yeats called them) swarm blackly through these pages, they find a series of living boughs on which to perch. The sadder poems about nature and life are, on the whole, the most memorable, but since one of the accidental services performed by any Collected Poems is to exert pressure on anthologies, anthologists of the future should not forget Nemerov's forceful, comic and bitter topical poems, ranging from World War II to Vietnam, and embracing even such unpoetical matters as loyalty oaths.

Robert B. Shaw ( date 25 February 1978)

SOURCE: Shaw, Robert B. “Making Some Mind of What Was Only Sense.” Nation 226 (25 February 1978): 213-15.

[In the following review of The Collected Poems, Shaw points to Nemerov's versatility as a poet and his attention to the important themes of great literature.]

What makes a man write a poem is a question which admits of no easy answer. My own initial question, prompted by Howard Nemerov's Collected Poems, is a related one, perhaps equally mysterious. What makes a man who has written a poem write another, and another, and another … ? This collection runs more than 500 pages, comprising nine volumes published over the last thirty years. Few of Nemerov's contemporaries can match his copiousness; one thinks back for comparison to the awesome productivity of Tennyson or Browning, or more recently that of Stevens and Yeats. The Victorians were at least assured of having a reading public to address; in our own time and place there would appear to be little incentive to be so prolific.

When a poet writes a lot nowadays one imagines that his impetus must come ever more decidedly from within. And the nature of that impetus must vary in character, if not in intensity. For Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, poems came faster as their intolerable emotions required more frequent purgation. For the later Wordsworth, by contrast, composition became a mechanical routine, disconnected from any emotional urgency, a passionless habit, like a daily walk to the mailbox. I do not think that Nemerov's extraordinary fluency can be traced back either to unbearable passions or to a need to fill the gap left by their absence. If he is obsessive, his obsession is like those which activated Yeats and Stevens; it is the prompting of a passionate intellect that leads him to write, the drive of a mind devoted to a set of ideas both irreducible and endlessly applicable. He may justly feel that he has in 516 pages barely scratched the surface of his chosen terrain.

The great simplicities, the essential themes, sound trite in summary, and the challenge to the poet is to insure that they will not sound trite when he invokes them in his poem. Nemerov repeatedly meets this challenge in exploring the classically problematic relationship of the self to the world, of the perceiving eye to the objects perceived. To what extent, he repeatedly wonders, is the world we see our own creation? Is design (meaning not merely pattern but purposefulness) truly present in the universe, or have men deluded themselves in discerning it there, struck a precarious truce with anarchic nature by projecting onto it the mind's rage for order and significance? And in either case, how is the function of the poem to be conceived? Is the poem a mirror reflecting the appearances of the world in responsible detail, or is it a window, a transparent medium through which we may see, perhaps, some reality beyond the usual appearances that hem us in? Or might it begin as the one and with care and luck become the other?

Nemerov never fully unravels these aesthetic and metaphysical knots. They provide him the material for endless reflection. “Reflection,” with its possibilities as image and pun, is a favorite word of Nemerov's, one of whose soldier volumes was entitled Mirrors and Windows. He prefers the spelling “reflexion,” which gives perhaps an additional punning facet to the word. It means for him not random musing but a strenuous mental exercise: as an athlete might flex his muscles, he takes the occasion of writing a poem to give his mind a workout.

A key episode in Nemerov's argument with himself over his favorite questions comes in “The Blue Swallows”: the poet delightedly watching the configurations made by the flying birds becomes aware of how his mind “Weaves up relation's spindrift web, / Seeing the swallows' tails as nibs / Dipped in invisible ink, writing. …” At this point skepticism bursts in:

Poor mind, what would you have them
          write?
Some cabalistic history
Whose authorship you might ascribe
To God? to Nature? Ah, poor ghost,
You've capitalized your Self enough.

This killjoy voice proceeds to reduce the scene to “The real world where the spelling mind / Imposes with its grammar book / Unreal relations on the blue / Swallows.” But the poet isn't content to let reductive rationalism have the final word. In the last lines he addresses the birds whose darting paths provoked his speculations:

O swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind's eye lit the sun.

This yearning to find again a world both beautiful and intelligible has, of course, a religious dimension. The question of design leads to the question of a Designer. On this point Nemerov is thoughtfully noncommittal: his agnosticism has, I should say, more spiritual depth than the faith of many conventional believers. When one considers the unseemly extremes toward which the problem of belief can propel an inquiring spirit—the crass cynicism of the village atheist, the holier-than-thou crouch of the convert—one appreciates the poise with which Nemerov continues to maintain his difficult balance on the edge of Occam's Razor. The oscillation in “The Blue Swallows” between a hunger for ultimate significance and a self-accusing skepticism that suspects that appetite of sentimentality or obscurantism is present in many of his poems, lending intensity to his ongoing dialogue with nature.

To turn from theme to technique, Nemerov's encounters with the appearances he finds so lovely and so enigmatic are precisely rendered, frequently memorable. Even apart from the train of thought attendant on it, one remembers the description in “The Mud Turtle”:

His lordly darkness decked in filth
Bearded with weed like a lady's favor,
He is a black planet, another world
Never till now appearing, even now
Not quite believably old and big,
Set in the summer morning's midst
A gloomy gemstone to the sun op-
          posed.

In his better poems Nemerov shares the gift that Frost had in his better ones, a sort of tact which keeps a proper distance from the scene observed, an instinct for finding a vantage point neither too close nor too far away. The presences of nature and the presence of the poet alike have room to make themselves felt; the verse itself (often a blank verse which like Frost's is relaxed, flexible, but ultimately true to form) gives a sense of spaciousness in which the mind can pursue its explorations freely.

Nemerov is a more versatile poet than I may thus far have indicated. Besides his most typical meditative colloquies with nature, he has written some fine narratives (“The Pond,” “A Day on the Big Branch”) as well as some brainy metaphysical lyrics that make their points without an evocation of landscape (“A Clock with No Hands,” “Moment,” “Celestial Globe”). There are also a great many satirical verses of various lengths. Lately Nemerov has relied heavily on the epigram, or as he likes to call it, the “gnome,” as a favored instrument of ridicule. These little squibs, like the heavier artillery that preceded them, batter their targets in a highly satisfying way. Here is one of the more benign ones, a condensed but largely accurate history of American poetry of the last few decades:

From epigram to epic is the course
For riders of the American winged
          horse.
They change both size and sex over
          the years.
The voice grows deeper and the beard
          appears;
Running for greatness they sweat away
          their salt,
They start out Emily and wind up
          Walt.

I have always enjoyed the wit and trenchancy of these pieces in the past, and thought them a bracing complement to the poet's less topical contemplations. Seeing them amassed in the present volume, however, I find myself noticing that the targets are in most cases predictable (U.S. foreign policy, the consumer society, passing fads and persistent fatuities) and that they sometimes repeat themselves with diminishing force. Nemerov years ago did such a number on Santa Claus (“Somewhere on his travels the strange Child / Picked up with this overstuffed confidence man …”) that you'd think he would feel able to let Christmas and its “shopping days” alone. Coming on his later treatments of the subject I began to wonder in dismay if he meant to produce something dyspeptic every year to be sent out with greetings of the season. I am glad he has written in this vein, giving voice to his urbane humor and justly provoked asperity. But these gnomes are probably a mite too populous, especially in the latter part of the collection where they may distract one from due attention to the fine recent work in serious modes.

I have few other reservations regarding this book. The two verse plays on biblical themes remain blank spots to me. And the poems in the first two volumes included here are admittedly derivative, bearing the typical influences of their period—Yeats and Auden, in particular. Yet these are honestly crafted, and interesting as background to Nemerov's mature achievement. His distinctive voice first emerged in parts of his third book, The Salt Garden (1955), and reached its dominant declaration in Mirrors and Windows (1958).

He continues to exercise mastery in exploring his perennial themes; it is remarkable to notice how many of his most recent poems are among his strongest. It is as though his mind, from regarding nature with such steady and respectful attention, had been blessed with something of nature's own capacity for self-renewal. One later poem, “Beginner's Guide,” can be read as a parable expressing the poet's evaluation of his life-long scrutiny of the world around him, and his attempt to match words to the world. He speaks of the guidebooks gathering dust on the shelf, discarded as nature's flux and prodigality outstripped attempts at classification:

The world would not, nor he could
          not, stand still.
The longest life might be too short
          a one
To get by heart, in all its fine detail,
Earth's billion changes swinging on
          the sun.

The poem ends with some stanzas which are vintage Nemerov: wry, touching, and modestly inspiring in their summing up:

Was it a waste, the time and the ex-
          pense,
Buying the books, going into the field
To make some mind of what was only
          sense,
And show a profit on the year's rich
          yield?
Though no authority on this theme
          either,
He would depose upon the whole
          that it
Was not. The world was always being
          wider
And deeper and wiser than his little
          wit,
But it felt good to know the hundred
          names.
And say them, in the warm room, in
          the winter,
Drowsing and dozing over his trying
          times,
Still to this world its wondering be-
          ginner.

Nemerov's contribution to our literature—as a gifted writer of fiction and critical prose, but pre-eminently as a poet—does not seem to me to have received as much celebrity as it deserves. Perhaps this is because he is so determinedly unhistrionic, refusing to equate feeling with noise. This unfashionable approach is one which I find appealing, believing as I do that my emotions as a reader, like the ingredients of a martini, are meant to be stirred rather than shaken. Nemerov's virtues are all in fact unfashionable ones for our time: vivid intelligence, an irreverent sense of humor, a mastery of formal verse, an awareness of mystery. One can only hope that the climate may have changed enough for this collection to attract a wide audience of “wondering beginners.” Such readers can expect to be charmed by the easy flow of Nemerov's reasoned discourse, and moved by those fine moments in his poems in which reason is overcome by awe.