[In the following review, Gage says that Figures of Thought exhibits Nemerov's tendency to approach a subject from a variety of directions, especially the question of what happens to thought when it is expressed.]

Howard Nemerov's new collection of essays contains speculations on subjects as diverse as the graphic art of M. C. Escher and the nature of time, each subject providing, however, but another background on which to flash his constant interest: what happens to thought when it becomes expression. In one essay, he tells of attending a night baseball game and suddenly discovering what Dante is up to in his use of symbolic figures in the Divine Comedy, by imagining how Cross and Eagle would look if flashed across the electric scoreboard. The book is full of such unlikely, but insightful, surprises.

Since insight follows from such accidents, I ought to say that when I read Figures of Thought I was coincidentally reading Robert Frost's remarks about poetry, scattered through essays and transcripts of talks. It may be an accident, therefore, but a provocative one, that throughout Nemerov's book I kept hearing Frost, though he is mentioned but once. I was not at all surprised to find, toward the end of the book, Nemerov describing his brief friendship with Frost as “the sympathetic vibration of two misanthropes” (p. 134). By then, this vibration had become, for me, part of what the book is about.

There is, for instance, the tonal echo, as when Nemerov draws back from his subject and invites the reader to “Try to think that thought right through” (p. 37), using the paragraph as Frost would have used the long pause. Or, as when Nemerov sportingly confesses, “O dear, it feels very strange to be quoting all this at you when I don't seem to understand it at all well myself,” he dons an imitation innocence, as Frost would do, to remind us that our own understanding of the quoted passage, “written in the lofty language of Art Criticism” (p. 159), had something of the Emperor's New Clothes about it. “O dear …” Frost would say to his audience, and then would follow their devastating compeuppance. Most of the fun in Nemerov's book comes from the way he, like Frost, expresses his impatience with the fashionable in criticism and poetry. The experience of reading Harold Bloom is reduced to the “melancholy lesson … that the effort to render English unintelligible is proceeding vigorously at the highest levels of learning” (p. 26). With equal annoyance, Nemerov convicts one of the most successful of poetry's present marketing strategies, the public reading, by citing the “danger … that any old garbage will go down all right if it's read with conviction” (p. 65). In this collection, Nemerov is at his misanthropic best.

It is in the substance of the book, however, that Nemerov is most like Frost, who used to describe his own manner of arranging a lecture by comparing himself to a dog with a number of bones buried about the yard, each of which he goes and worries in turn. Nemerov, too, worries his main themes suddenly and from different angles. These themes are, for simplicity: that thinking is modelled on language; that language is distinctly limited as a means of mediating between reality, or experience, and mind; that poetry, made of thinking and language, is not a way to truth, but that it has the potential for consoling us for the lack of truth we suffer and thereby becoming the source of truths of a special sort; that modern poetry often fails because of its naive view of language as directly embodying reality; and that modern criticism and education often fail because, sharing this view of language, they prevent poetry from teaching the only sort of truths it is capable of. In different contexts, Nemerov is engaged in discussing these themes or, obliquely, illustrating them.

Just as Frost asserted frequently that all thinking is based on metaphor, producing what he liked to call “stand offs” between opposing ideas, Nemerov takes the process of relating pairs of opposing terms to be the means by which thought is forced by language to interpret and misinterpret experience. “It seems that the mind's characteristic mode of action,” he says, “is to take the vast multiplicity of the visible world and reduce it to a single … pair of terms. … Language, made of warring opposites, becomes the instrument of conquest and domination” (p. 91). And, after a splendid parody of logic explaining away a proverb, he injects the “humbling reminder that all we think we think depends upon language, language that already exists before we think, and in which we inherit … human wisdom and human folly at the same time” (p. 44). Thinking is, at best, “an artifice,” behind which lurks “the second nature called language” (p. 193). Since this means that “What we know is never the object, but only our knowing” (p. 19). Nemerov views thought in the service of truth as essentially problematical. He would like to think of poetry as an act of knowing but not as knowledge, to be unproblematical, if experienced sympathetically: “It is … the power of poetry to be somewhat more like a mind than a thought” (p. 62).

Nemerov is fully aware of the irony of using language to assert the inadequacy of language, an unwitting paradox he often reveals in the writing of others on the subject. Because he is aware of it, he is not categorical about the relativism that would seem to follow from such speculations. Instead, he is playful about it, as Frost was who used metaphors to describe both “the strength and weakness” of metaphor itself: “All metaphor breaks down. That is the beauty of it. It is touch and go with metaphor. … You have to know how far to ride it.” Nemerov, asserting a similar fact about metaphor, cannot be doctrinaire, for he recognizes that since his own language is bound by the limits of metaphor it can only succeed to the degree that it is poetical.

For Nemerov, then, as for Frost, the beauty of poetry is that it emphasizes the game of language, not the truth of it, and that it teaches you to be “at home” in metaphor, to use Frost's phrase, so that you can tell when it is breaking down on you in any sort of thinking. “Poetry,” according to one of Nemerov's playful definitions, “is the sport of the intellect” (p. 10), just as Frost's favorite analogue for poetry was athletics. He cites James Dickey's phrase, “metaphor as pure adventure” (p. 39), without noting that Dickey got it from Frost, who often spoke of “the adventure into materiality,” as the serious object of the poet's playfulness with metaphor and with form. Nemerov not only shares something of the antagonism toward free verse that Frost derived from his preoccupation with this adventure, but also the belief, as Nemerov says, that “Poetry speaks of the spirit's being able to renew itself, in spite of knowledge, in spite of pain, in spite of death” (p. 14). This is a version of Frost's familiar “momentary stay against confusion,” the result of “risking spirit in substantiation,” the process of both form in poetry and Incarnation in religion. For Nemerov, likewise, poetry is “getting something right in language” (p. 55), an unexplainable transformation, so that “in its highest range, the theory of poetry would be the theory of the Incarnation, which seeks to explain how the Word became Flesh (p. 7). In the adventure of getting something right, poetry shares with painting Nemerov tells us, the ability to teach us “not to despair, not to give up, but to continue the search with as much humor and patience as possible” (p. 125). Similarly, for Frost, poetry yields nothing to believe in, except the act of asserting the freedom of form (as opposed to the freedom from it), and the spirit of adventure is not to give up the game.

Such a view necessarily has implications for how poetry ought to be read and taught and judged. It ought to be read, Nemerov says, “by making it your own, rather than quickly translating it into something else rather like it.” Its understanding, he says, is “simple and silent” (p. 108), again reminding one of Frost with his favorite analogies for the process of understanding a poem: love at first sight, or knowing how to take a hint. Frost's preference for “devotional” as opposed to “exegetical reading,” is also Nemerov's, who says that “the success of explicative criticism is precisely its failure” (p. 111). He advocates that poetry not be taught, if that means explicated, but rather that students be allowed to be “taught by poetry” (p. 103), with a result similar to that sought by Frost in his essay “Education by Poetry.” One of the things poetry can teach, if left alone to do it, is “a general and surprising apprehension of the precariousness of all language, meaning, knowledge” (p. 108). Poetry compels the inspection of received assumptions about language and meaning as the embodiment of reality, as if reality were fashioned after language, and Nemerov believes that poetry loses this power in the hands of critics who hold those very assumptions dear. Rather than to reduce the “strangeness” of the poetic mode, Nemerov sees the teacher's role as to “make the familiar strange” (p. 106). After his attack on Bloom, and another on New Criticism (which after all gave us the “heresy of paraphrase”), it may seem odd for Nemerov to advocate such a role. But it only seems so until one realizes that for Nemerov it is a corrective role, and he does not advocate the silent “meditation” on poetry in the classroom as a replacement for analysis but only as a way to rediscover that poetry is beautiful, that its sound is valuable for its own sake (cf. Frost's “sentence sounds”), and that one can sometimes understand a difficult poem best by realizing that it means literally what it says. Frost only harped at his interpreters for exercising what Nemerov calls “the temptation … to make our experience of poetry both more intellectual and more pretentious that it is or ought to be” (p. 60).

Then there is the question of judgment. Nemerov's conclusions about the failure of modern poetry center on the inheritance of imagism, with its insistence on “seeing as superior to thinking, as opposed to thinking, and something the poet must do instead of thinking” (p. 152). Since Nemerov views metaphor as inevitable in language, he is skeptical about the efforts of imagism to avoid the conventional assertion of relationships in order to get at reality unmediated and to sever the essentially metaphorical connection between image and meaning. “Most ideas,” says Nemerov, “are not contained in the mere names of things … and have to be supplied from elsewhere” (p. 154). He views imagism as an attempt to get rid of ideas, and he sees this as a “crippled and crippling response” to the attempts by modernist thinkers to read mind out of the universe (p. 168). This, for Nemerov, is an impossibility, for a mind has to be doing the reading. It is but one of the ironies of modernist thinking about poetics which Nemerov cites. “No ideas but in things,” is, after all, an idea and an abstract one at that. “A poem must not mean but be,” to take another of modern poetry's slogans, is asserted meaningfully in a poem.

And so Nemerov judges modernist, if not all modern, poetry: “Indeed, these movements, like some movements in philosophy (and not in the branches of aesthetics alone), found themselves impelled, by the necessities of rhetoric if by nothing more serious, to a contempt for mind” (p. 166). I'm a bit puzzled by one part of the statement. If the phrase “by the necessities of rhetoric if by nothing more serious” refers to the poets' need to argue their theories, it makes sense. If, however, Nemerov means that rhetoric is unserious in its relation to poetics, I remain puzzled. It was because of the imagists' contempt for rhetoric that they were impelled to a contempt for mind, for it is a central proposition of imagist theory that rhetoric controls perception and must be escaped if perception is to catch an unconventional glimpse of the object. Nemerov has, in fact, taken the opposite line, that rhetoric, because it controls how we think about what we perceive, is inescapable, especially in poetry where “figures” do not lurk behind the language but become the surface. What poets know, he says, is that “Everything we think we know is a figure of speech” (p. 8). The very title of his book alerts us that it is to be taken as a book about rhetoric, the phrase “figures of thought” having its origins in classical rhetoric as the heading under which relations between thought and language were taken up, however superficially by comparison. Nemerov's book is, in fact, a contribution to a rhetorical way of thinking about poetry, a way that was, until Romanticism, the standard way of thinking about it. What this tells me, and what the parallels between his way and Frost's way tells me, is that these are not new ideas. Rather, they are old ideas whose time seems to keep coming over and over, and which need the wit and bravado of misanthropes like Nemerov and Frost for us to hear about the din.