[In the following essay, Wood laments the neglect of Nemerov's work in British publications and praises the poet's ironic vision.]

Randall Jarrell had a famous quip about poetic status: ‘The poet has a peculiar relation to the public. It is unaware of his existence’. In this country, Howard Nemerov certainly has a peculiar relation to the public: he hasn't been published by a British publisher since 1968¹. Nemerov's work is civilized, lenient, ruminative. His voice combines irony and lyricism—the democratic tones of post-war America, heard also in Wilbur and James Merrill, in Cheever and Updike: a public-spirited wryness, a serene and civil calm fed by personal intensities, disturbance, but threatening at moments to break out into impoliteness or revelatory explicitness. He is a major poet, garlanded with awards (his Collected Poems won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize). That we should have ignored him for so long, while tending our own minor allotments, is shaming.

Nemerov's early poems, like Berryman's, are shadowed by Auden. The strictness, the rhetoric of urgency, the rapid gestures (‘the vacant expressions of the habitually wary’), the tendency towards public homily—all these Audenisms can be found in Nemerov's first collection, The Image and the Law (1947). But already, Nemerov's own voice is breaking through. It emerges decisively in just two lines of a poem called ‘The Truth of the Matter’. The poet is indoors, leafing through the Sunday papers. He stumbles on this story: ‘The head of a great sugar refinery / Has died of diabetes. That sounds right’. This is not Auden, but an American voice, rich in contemporary information, and loaded with an irony that comes not from literary superiority but from a kind of small, civic resistance—the poet, through irony, through wit, through a thoughtful mildness, marks out his own space amongst modern confusions. Or as Nemerov slyly puts it in another poem: ‘history begins at home’.

Unlike Berryman, Nemerov has never thrown off Auden and gone in search of his own original, untouched voice. Placid, wise, intimate, Nemerov is not a wildly original poet. Form offers a confirmation rather than a challenge to him; his language carries its meaning without radical anxiety. Most of his poems are well-wrought urns. Indeed, Nemerov has spent much of his life extending and exploring one of Auden's great dilemmas: that of how to address the world lyrically yet with the requisite modern scepticism of the twentieth century poet after early modernism. Auden dramatized this, in poems and essays, as a struggle between a sacred response to the world, and a newer, profane questioning of the world. In many poems Nemerov accepts this conflict, but plays with it on his own, American terms.

In a wonderful but risky poem called ‘A Day on the Big Branch’, he confronts lyrical cliché with the restless dissatisfaction of America. The poet and his friends, who have been playing poker all night, decide to travel out to barren country to spend the day musing on eternity and suchlike:

by the old standard appeal to the wilderness,
the desert, the empty places of our exile,
bringing only the biblical bread and cheese
and cigarettes got from a grocer's on the way.

The men go high up, into Romantic mountains and sacred wilderness. Stolidly, their pores oozing whisky and sweat, they lie out on the rocks and face the sun. But these men, their ‘minds full of telephone / numbers and flushes’, are unmoved. The sacred has no leverage. Nemerov, typically, sees the comedy in this confused encounter (he is one of the most unsolemn poets imaginable, liable at any moment to break into laughter). Guying his own expectations, he denounces the rocks for not bringing forth the water of Moses: ‘the rocks / were modern American rocks, and hard as rocks’. The group goes home calmed and pacified perhaps, but ‘some / would never batter that battered copy of Walden / again’.

In ‘The Loon's Cry’, Nemerov mourns our modern distance from an old world of sacred symbols and energies. The poet, by instinct—perhaps by calling—is lyrically excited, but his every thought is interrupted by the thick-fingered pragmatisms of our age. He watches the sun setting, notices that the moon is also rising, and feels charged, ‘the fulcrum of two poised immensities’:

But I could think only, Red sun, white moon, This is a natural beauty, it is not Theology.

We have fallen, he suggests, from ‘the symboled world’, and traded in our mysteries for things (particularly perhaps in mystery-shallow America). Reality is now in things, and with sadness we have discovered that ‘Reality exhausted all their truth’. As Nemerov has aged, this language of Fallenness has become more pronounced. Maturity brings only ‘so much of which no one is able to use’. ‘There used to be gods in everything, and now they've gone’, he grumbles in ‘The Companions’. Increasingly, his yearning for an original ardour has propelled him back to his childhood, which emerges in his poems with great simplicity and naturalness (one of Nemerov's great charms is the sense he gives of a whole personality, of a poet with rich personal resources on which to draw.) In ‘Home for the Holidays’, the adult Nemerov regrets that travel by train lacks the romance it had for him as boy, and recalls how he used to watch the sleeper-cars:

For hours in the winter dusk I watched
The lighted cars go up the grade
To vanish in the dark of dark (I hoped
To see a naked woman but never did)

In his quietest poems, these large disappointments leave the realm of the sacred and profane and become a pure and personal nostalgia for childhood, what he calls ‘the remorse for time’ in a poem of the same title:

When I was a boy, I used to go to bed,
By daylight, in the summer, and lie awake
Between the cool, white, reconciling
sheets …

Nemerov is by instinct however, a poet of public address who has private moments. America tempts its poets this way, from Whitman to Lowell. What is so touching, so beguiling, about Nemerov, is that he doesn't play the poet. He is not Whitman's ‘equalizer of his age and land’, and not Lowell's patrician eccentric, but more like Berryman's ‘insignificant dreamer’. He goes with us in this valley, we think. Such self-levelling is not easy. Few poets manage it. You can see it best in ‘The Fourth of July’, one of his finest, yet simplest poems. It is an intensely moving, sweetly compact poem. In its 31 lines, a citizen and a country expand and wither. A little drunk, the poet watches the Independence Day fireworks from his window. He has tears in his eyes:

… The reason I am crying,
Aside from only being country drunk,
That is, may be that I have just remembered
The sparklers, rockets, roman candles, and
So on, we used to be allowed to buy
When I was a boy, and set off by ourselves
At some peril to life and property.

Things are different now, notes the poet. Little boys are no longer allowed to abuse their freedom thus, and instead ‘the authorities / Arrange a perfectly safe public display / To be watched at a distance’. Millions of taxpayers produce a spectacle which outstrips the poet's childish games. And this is good, perhaps. ‘It is, indeed, splendid: / Showers of roses in the sky, fountains / Of emeralds …’ The poems ends perfectly, with a sad irony so wrenching, a wistfulness so tugging, that the poet's heart seems to burst smilingly:

My eyes are half-afloat with happy tears.
God bless our Nation on a night like this,
And bless the careful and secure officials
Who celebrate our independence now.

Understatement is all, here. The evasion of emotion and obvious nostalgia—through irony—only squeezes more pathos from the poem. The poet's nostalgia for the careless freedoms of childhood is also a larger ‘Goodbye, Columbus’: a farewell to a country's uncomplex immaturity. One notes that suggestive ‘country drunk’: perhaps a whole nation is weeping, looking from windows. America may have its powerful maturity, its solacing collectivities (all those bountiful taxpayers), and one is thankful for these massgratifications. But an ardour, a self-reliance, has gone (officials now celebrate for us.) Lucid, humble, suffering, the poet experiences all this and lets us know. He forces nothing on us.

It is irony, above all, that gives him his sparkling, angled vision. Through irony, he inspects his own lyricism, through irony he softens the poet's certainties and visionary advantages, and becomes almost a fellow-citizen. The poet, admired, as Auden put it, for his earnest habit of calling the sun the sun, allows the world to disturb his rights. In his poems, irony is modernity's signature, as in this characteristic joke, ‘A Modern Poet’:

Crossing at rush hour the Walt Whitman Bridge
He stopped at the Walt Whitman Shopping Center
And bought a paperback copy of Leaves of Grass.
Fame is the spur, he figured; given a Ford
Foundation Fellowship, he'd buy a Ford.

Nemerov is so varied and plentiful that one can read the Collected Poems (unavailable here) without fatigue or over-loading. He is not a poet of particularities: one does not find beads and jewels in every sentence. One travels instead along a meditative string, feeling its vibrations. He is humble but knowing, nostalgic but nervously of his age, a sceptic who still believes in a poetry of reason. His language is placid, but can be comically rapid, mobile and American, when called upon. James Dickey calls him ‘the most unboring poet I know’. That gets the measure of him. He deserves to be published here before we forget what a mind functioning in all its expansiveness, with its enlargements and miraculous clarities, is like. Let it be soon.

Note

1. Chicago University Press did publish Nemerov's War Stories (reviewed by John Greening on pxx) here in 1988, price £8.75. Some copies may still be obtainable.