[In the following essay, Burris presents a memoir of Nemerov as well as critiques of A Howard Nemerov Reader and Trying Conclusions.]

I was sitting on the front porch of Rebel's Rest, the watering hole for the faculty and fellows of the Sewanee Writers Conference, when Howard Nemerov told me that there were only two levels of diction available to the American poet: the plain and the not-so-plain. Long familiar with Nemerov's poetry and criticism, I had never spent an extended amount of time with him, but during the first few days at Sewanee I learned quickly that disagreement over a matter of this sort would be partner to peril. Rhetorical seduction had always been one of Nemerov's prominent talents, so I smiled knowingly and continued to do so until he concluded, “That is a proposition, of course, that we dare not defend.” I laughed. “Exactly,” he said. “You're learning.”

But Nemerov's instruction permitted little else. Pop psychologists used to speak, and without much precision, of the power of a person's physical presence, particularly when they judged it to be presidential, and although Nemerov in his full ensemble of denim jacket, T-shirt, short pants, sock-feet, and martini would have presented a substantial challenge to the image makers on Capitol Hill, his overall bearing continually amplified the point he was trying to make. It was partly, perhaps largely, his eyes, blue pilot's eyes, that seemed not to have aged a day since his bombing runs in World War II. Going through Nemerov's poems again, and watching him peer at me from the dust jackets of his new books, I have been struck continually by the clarity of those eyes. An otherwise slight poem, “World Lines: A War Story,” leaps off the page now as a testament to his perspicacity, both literal and figurative:

And there I was, is how these things begin,
Doing my final exam, a solo test
Of navigation by dead reckoning;
If you got there and back, you had to pass.
I got there in good shape, a mining town
Far north of nowheresville, and had turned for home
When the cloud closed down and the snow swept in,
Nothing but speeding snow and darkness white,
But I found the spur of a railroad headed south,
The Iron Compass, the Lost Flyer's Friend,
And followed that at a couple of hundred feet
Until it tunneled into the side of a hill,
And there I was. What then? What happened then?
Now who was I to know what happened then,
A kid just out of school the year before?
His buttons and bones are somewhere out there still.

Whether perched several hundred feet in the air or ensconced in the classroom behind his desk, Nemerov entrusted many of his daily negotiations to the dependable precision of his eyes and as if to reward him for his trust, they also supplied him with poems.

There were many Boswells to Nemerov's Johnson that summer, and each of us compiled a different catalog of impressions, each of us, as my telephone conversations have recently confirmed, left Sewanee with some versions of Nemerov that occasionally cohere and occasionally collide. The truth of minute particulars often eludes the closest scrutiny, but minute particulars, for better or worse, are the fodder of memory. What follows then are my own versions of the man, culled from hastily scribbled notes that brandish their quotation marks with a certain note of bravado. My current impression, clearly erroneous, is that for two weeks in July of 1990 at the Sewanee Writers Conference, Nemerov never stopped talking about the things that mattered to him—his family, his friends, the minutiae of daily life, and the expected obsession, poetry. It came as no surprise that Nemerov would cite John Donne as one of his earliest influences. Sitting in the rocker, walking along the paths from building to building, gesticulating, pausing, Nemerov took a keen and seemingly physical delight in what he had—a great capacity to think.

For Nemerov, thought represented “the strangest game of all,” as he phrased it in one of his reviews, and this ludic quality, encompassing even the arch self-consciousness of dramatic performance, informed his last published poem, “The End of the Opera.” The poem opens with a concise sketch of the controlling situation: “Knowing that what he witnessed was only art, / He never wept while the show was going on. / But the curtain call could always make him cry. …” During the curtain call, the actors bowed, waved, and perspired, and it was this sudden revelation of their fallible humanity, their fraction of the dramatic illusion, that had occasioned the tears of the narrator. Like Prospero at the end of The Tempest, the narrator of Nemerov's poem has seen the rough magic of his stage suddenly abjured by the singers, and however we might value the aesthetic lineage that isolates enchantment and disenchantment as the two necessary oppositions of art, we can place Nemerov's work—his poetry, criticism, and even his fiction—in the long tradition of writers who concerned themselves, in Bruno Bettelheim's words, with the uses of enchantment.

Enchantment, however conjured, requires the deliberate deployment of rhetorical strategies, particularly those strategies that, in the writer's judgment, will insure success. To Nemerov this ultimately involved privileging the matter of style to find the correct modulation for the task at hand, and he obviously felt that the plain style, as he practiced it, was the most useful one in his arsenal. As his career developed, his verse relied increasingly on the conversational spontaneity that invites the most haphazard accidents into the precinct of the poem. Or another way of saying essentially the same thing: Nemerov's decision to develop a singularly matter-of-fact tone made available to him an extraordinary range of subject matters from the mundane to the momentous, from “Walking the Dog,” for example, to “By Al Leibowitz's Pool.” And I believe that he made this stylistic decision rationally and deliberately. One afternoon Nemerov asked if I might have the time to fetch him a stack of Dick Francis' mysteries from the duPont Library, and when I returned with them, he opened Hot Money, the one on top, and read aloud the first paragraph: “I intensely disliked my father's fifth wife, but not to the point of murder.” “That,” Nemerov said, “seems to me decorously done. I have a friend who thinks Francis' prose style simplistic, and I cannot talk him out of his position. As for me, I think Dick Francis woke up one morning and said to himself, ‘I am going to write clearly and plainly today, which will be enough for one day's work.’ That is a decision of great integrity, and I respect him for having made it.”

I felt then, and still do, that Nemerov's fascination with mysteries in general, and with Francis' work in particular, reflected certain fundamental interests that gave birth to his own verse: the clarity, suddenly revealed, that issues from a seemingly random narration of facts; the continually operative assumption that things—leaves, birds, the middle class—are not as simple as they seem; the resulting and focused examination of leaves, birds, and the middle class, searching always for the surprising luminosity that streams from the most ordinary human endeavor; and perhaps the most important element of this sensibility, the overriding will to usher the facts and observations of the poem to their logical conclusion, their final closure. For Nemerov, as for the detective, this kind of semantic closure often involved simple principles of deduction. Ultimately, it involved the game of thought, and as Nemerov pronounced this to be the strangest game of all, he also introduced himself as one of our most avid and accomplished gamesters.

I had seen Nemerov several years earlier and noticed the pleasure he took in displaying his gymnastic intellect through casual conversation. And still, at Sewanee, visibly aged, he seemed to be one of those few people, as La Rochefoucauld put it, who are qualified to grow old. His brushy plume of white hair, sternly clipped, his long avian legs, his head jutting forward from his neck, his stride graceful but measured—Nemerov often looked to me from a distance like an exotic heron wading the shallows. After seventy years of moving through the world, after talking at great length and with sizable sophistication about that world, the figure that Nemerov cut seemed, like the heron, a grand extravagance of evolution. What other body, conceived and executed according to any other design, could have possibly developed and transported those particular ideas that we will hereafter call Nemerovian?

As with any such ars poetica, the confident avowals of the program were intended to distract attention from its own weaknesses, from those areas most vulnerable to the interrogation of opposing camps. Nemerov's insistence on his own system of clarity, both rhetorical and intellectual, was directed against the puffed diction and hazy conceptualizing of those he referred to as the “verseballs” of poetry—writers whose sense of form never moves beyond a mechanical numbering of accents. But Nemerov's particular sort of clarity also exposed him to one of the most feared charges of our serious century—the composition of light verse or, perhaps more accurately, occasional verse. He was aware of this reaction to some of his poetry, considered it moronic, and spoke to this issue over supper one night in Bishop's Common. The poet, he said, who seems to be deeply complex on the first reading, particularly in matters of diction, runs the risk of being found out on the second reading. “Oh,” says the reader, “now I get it. This poet is not so deeply complex after all.” The effect is one of deflation. On the other hand, Nemerov continued, the poet who seems simplistic the first time through stands a very good chance of being ennobled by the reader the second time through. “There must be more here,” says such a reader, “than meets the eye. This is a deeply complex poet.” The effect is one of elevation. You make your choice, Nemerov concluded, and write your poem.

Two things stand out about this anecdote. First, it is essentially an elaboration of the distinction I mentioned earlier between the plain and the not-no-plain dictions of poetry, and the obvious love of antithesis that informs the idea immediately aligns it with one of the oldest traditions of philosophical debate: the categorization of experience into two opposing factions, encouraging, paradoxically, the immediate and continual adjustment of these categories until the conceptual ground that originally lay between them is thoroughly traversed and examined. What had originally seemed a simplistic division encourages an exhaustive examination. And second, there is a clear tendency in Nemerov's doctrine to view the poetic expression as what Auden called a “verbal contraption.” The reader, of course, becomes the target of these high jinks, and the reader, if the poem is to be successful, must be enchanted, or perhaps more strongly, must be adroitly manipulated.

To speak of the manipulation and persuasion of the reader is to speak of classical rhetoric, and much of Nemerov's commentary on the poems presented to him by the student writers at Sewanee issued from the fundamental rubric of invention, arrangement, and diction. “When your poem is failing in its central argument,” he told one student, “you can proceed a bit further if your English sentence continues as if things were going along beautifully. You can be given a period of grace, in fact, to recover your argument if you are acquainted with the architectural aspects of our grammar. But if you can't write a good English sentence, you can't write a good English poem.” Nemerov always confessed himself, both in conversation and in print, to be an inefficient teacher of verse writing, but a comment that he made in his essay “Poetry and Meaning”—which is included in A Howard Nemerov Reader—reveals more of his teaching strategy than most anything else I have read by him:

For there is always present a temptation … to make our experience of poetry both more intellectual and more pretentious than it is or ought to be. … Without denying that our experience of poetry is sometimes one or more of those things, I think it proper to acknowledge that it is not always like that, and may not often be like that. A primary pleasure in poetry is surely something low enough to be beneath the notice of teacher or critic—the pleasure of saying something over for its own sweet sake and because it sounds just right.

Nemerov insisted that his students' poems aim to sound “just right,” and in helping his students to pursue this particular rectitude, he assumed that the inexperienced ear needs training if it were to recognize the proper music. So he brought examples of this music to class. An hour or so before a session was scheduled to begin, Nemerov would disappear into the duPont Library and reappear with a stack of xeroxes—a lesser known poem by Thomas Hardy, I remember, and one by George Herbert—and he would proceed to read the poem, talk about its various successes, draw a general point from his observations, and then turn to the students' poems, often showing how this same general point was inapplicable to any of the work that lay before him. Nemerov could be very hard on his students. His notions about literature were derived from the literature that he had read—a logical enough procedure—and he reasoned that if his students were to learn anything about the enterprise they had undertaken, then they too must do the required reading. Nemerov's list, and his retention of that list, would burden most of the voracious readers that I have known, and an inability to discuss the range of English, American, and European writing often signaled to him an inability to write poetry. “Do you like Richard II as much as ever?” I asked him once. “Which line?” he responded.

Had his students at Sewanee been able to leaf through A Howard Nemerov Reader before they worked with him, I suspect they might have weathered the storm more efficiently. Here is ample testimony, conveniently collected, to the man whom Monroe K. Spears once labeled a “triple threat”—a godsend to those who edit quarterlies, a writer able to provide poetry, criticism, and fiction, all of an extraordinarily high degree of sophistication. He enjoyed, he said, commissioned work—there was always something of the good schoolboy in Nemerov, and the great mass of material that he produced over his career derived partly from his unflagging will to set himself assignments that he then proceeded to complete. Nemerov, in fact, was a precocious student, and recognition in the literary world came very early to him. During his Harvard days in the late thirties, he approached Thaddeus Lockard, his tutor at Adams House, to settle on a reading list, and although Victorian fiction had been the proposed subject, Nemerov had already gone through the relevant material. They ultimately decided on Thomas Mann's fiction, and when Lockard read Nemerov's final essay on The Magic Mountain, he was so impressed with it that he suggested to Nemerov that he send a copy of it to Mann, then currently in residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. The rest of the story is legendary—Mann was mightily impressed with it and invited Nemerov down for tea. Heady stuff for an undergraduate. Good students—and the poets that worked with Nemerov that summer were good ones—have an innate ability to tolerate better ones.

Most of Nemerov's students at Sewanee, though, were unaware of this story, and even had they been aware of it, they would not have been any more eager to learn that their revisions of a botched poem had ruined yet another perfectly good sheet of bond paper. And he was not averse to recommending that young poets—or older poets for that matter—whose verse he did not admire find another line of work, and that they do so immediately before they wasted any more of his or their time. As I have said, Nemerov could be hard on his students, yet some of them who had survived his withering gaze felt stronger in their survival—I cannot help but think that his tactics were often successful. But his conversation about the poetry he loved dazzled indiscriminately. Nemerov's literary talk—incisive, opinionated, thoroughly informed—avoided academic sobriety, displaying the wit and banter that became his trademark. Talking with Nemerov about whatever he read—only a cliché will do here—was an unbridled joy. It is an old-fashioned idea, I am sure, but Nemerov's accomplishments and talents seemed to me to warrant a respectful toleration of his periodically gruff manner, and many of his students at Sewanee agreed.

His gruffness, of course, was never reserved solely for his students. Aside from the unqualified and unstinting praise he heaped on the verse of Mona Van Duyn and Anthony Hecht, Nemerov often kept a pregnant silence when questioned about much contemporary poetry. This was partly wisdom, partly semaphore (if you can't say something nice …). Once, as we were walking past the library with several students, we saw a worker disappear down a manhole. Beside the manhole, a spanking red two-cycle engine was chugging along noisily, and from it a bright yellow, corrugated tube descended to the sewer under the street. A makeshift fence corralled the entire apparatus much like the barriers in museums that surround prized statuary. Someone wondered aloud what this contraption might be; someone else suggested that it was an oxygen pump. “Perhaps,” Nemerov retorted. “But when it stops working properly, which it soon will, and we have to resuscitate its poor victims, we shall call it contemporary poetry.”

A Howard Nemerov Reader provides an efficient introduction to the mind of the man who occupied such a distinctive niche in the world of contemporary letters, and who described his teaching method as “ramble and bumble.” But Nemerov also rambled and bumbled his way through poems, critical essays, personal essays, short stories, and novels with remarkable facility, and although his literary forebear seems likely to be Auden—Nemerov vigorously denied this when I suggested it to him at Sewanee, which makes the lineage even more credible—Robert Penn Warren is the only other writer who worked as distinctively in these same genres. There, of course, the similarity ends, and the emphases given by each to the various forms vary widely, but they both established their careers by eschewing with great vigor the specialization that often characterizes the contemporary poet or novelist. Federigo, Or the Power of Love (1954), Nemerov's second novel—he wrote three—is reprinted here in its entirety, and it is a delight, an inspired spoof of psychoanalysis, religiosity, self-fulfillment, sexual desire, extramarital affairs, cocktail parties, selfishness, the ego, the id, advertising, and finally, human frailty. Perhaps Neil Simon has read this novel; if he has not, and if he does so, he will wish that he wrote it.

Some will be surprised to find that the Reader devotes only fifty-odd pages to Nemerov's poetry, and these in a volume of over five hundred pages. Perhaps the editors anticipated Chicago's Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991—no need to compete with that in a volume explicitly designed as a sampler. But “The Loon's Cry” is not here, nor is “By Al Leibowitz's Pool,” pivotal poems in Nemerov's development. Such a small role, in fact, do the poems play in this particular representation of Nemerov's career that I would assume the editors, Beverly Jarrett and William Mills, chose to concentrate on the fiction and the criticism in order to introduce the reader to a lesser known aspect of his work. But no serious student of contemporary poetry would be unaware of Nemerov's literary essays, or even further, would be without them. The Reader's primary value lies in its reprinting of Federigo; the poems in full selections or complete volumes are available elsewhere, and most of the essays are as well.

The editors have reminded us, though, that Nemerov could have had a notable career in American letters either as a critic or novelist alone, and it is this kind of public homage that the Reader provides and that Nemerov deserves. He was, to my mind, least successful in his short stories. Eight stories and anecdotal pieces, culled from two collections, appear here, and that seems a gracious plenty. Nemerov apparently needed the extreme constriction of a poem or the expansive length of a novel to exercise his talents most efficiently, and even though his stories are, as they say, “well done,” Nemerov never seemed to have acclimated himself to the particular economy of the genre. Originally appearing in Stories, Fables & Other Diversions and included here, “Digressions around a Crow” is a difficult piece to classify but provides a fine example of Nemerov's virtuosity in what might be called the literary divertimento. The ending of the third section, entitled “Digression on Birds,” shows how deftly he managed the difficult negotiation between the anecdotal and the moral. Nemerov had seen a bird he considered to be a rarity in the area, and when he telephoned Thomas, his friend who had professional expertise in these matters, he recommended that Nemerov kill the bird for a positive identification. The final paragraph of the section gets just right Nemerov's innate sense of parable and instruction:

A rather casual attitude, I thought, toward morality; and a great price for a poor bird to pay, only for being a thousand miles out of place. In fairness to Thomas, though, I must allow his attitude toward humanity to include a similar factor of objectivity: the reduction of the race by, say, one half, seems to him a reasonable remedy for most of our troubles. As he has pointed out, if you have two major problems—overpopulation and nuclear weapons—one of them will sooner or later be viewed, not without reason, as the solution to the other.

The personal anecdote that leads to the articulation of a general, rhetorically balanced truth (“one … the solution to the other”)—this is pure Nemerov, and it was a talent he continued to develop and refine throughout his career.

As I read through this collection, I was continually confronted with various versions of Nemerov's distinction between the plain and the not-so-plain. Here is the poetic version, taken from “Vermeer”:

Taking what is, and seeing it as it is,
Pretending to no heroic stances or gesture,
Keeping it simple; being in love with light
And the marvelous things that light is able to do,
How beautiful! a modesty which is
Seductive extremely, the care for daily things. …
If I could say to you and make it stick,
A girl in a red hat, a woman in blue
Reading a letter, a lady weighing gold …
If I could say this to you so you saw,
And knew, and agreed that this was how it was
In a lost city across the sea of years,
I think we should be for one moment happy. …

And here is the prose version, which comes from an answer to a questionnaire that Nemerov had set for other writers, but which he found himself having to answer: “I now regard simplicity and the appearance of ease in the measure as primary values, and the detachment of a single thought from its ambiguous surroundings as a worthier object than the deliberate cultivation of ambiguity.”

The deliberate cultivation of ambiguity—it would certainly have made Nemerov's list of deadly sins, and it lay behind much of the rambling and bumbling he did when confronted with students. There is more to this aversion than meets the eye, and an important point needs to be made here, one that touches on the way in which a poet's literary practice, both in his poetry and in his theorizing about the poetry, impinges in delicate but influential ways on the students that gather around him. Nemerov's suspicion of ambiguity, if transmuted slightly, turns up elsewhere in an essay on the structure of metaphor as a forthright and grateful praise of mystery. That mysteriousness should be enshrined in a discussion of metaphor only emphasizes how central mysteriousness became to Nemerov's conception of the poetic enterprise. In his essay “On Metaphor,” included in the Reader, Nemerov delineates two sorts of metaphor, one of which he characterizes as “verifiable” and the other as “not verifiable by any living person.” The former includes the common metaphors that crowd our speech and our poems, those that bring together two “objects whose natures are known”—the legs of a table, for example. But the latter purposely avoids verification, or at least, as Nemerov added, verification “by any living person.” The examples he adduces—“Care-charmer sleep, son of the sable night, Brother to death, and so on”—imply that what is known can demonstrate what is unknown, or that the visible can be viewed as a reflection of the invisible.

So far, so good. But the final paragraph of the essay assigns a hierarchical value to these two applications of metaphor, allotting one to the great poets and one to the lesser poets. I quote the paragraph in its entirety not only because it summarizes so much of Nemerov's thinking about literature, but because it will provide a useful way for talking about Nemerov as an instructor of young poets:

Poetry in the hands of the great masters constantly tends to a preoccupation with the second sort of figure, making statements about invisible mysteries by means of things visible; and poems, far from resting in nature as their end, use nature as a point from which they extrapolate darkly the nature of all things not visible or mediately knowable by the reason—the soul, society, the gods or god, the mind—to which visible nature is equivocally the reflexion and the mask. Such poetry is magical, then, because it treats the world as a signature, in which all things intimate to us by their sensible properties what and in what way we are. Poetry is an art of naming, and this naming is done by story-telling and by metaphorical approximations and refinements, according to the two principles of magic I have described.

Regarding the terms “ambiguity” and “mystery,” I would not, of course, suggest that the two are synonymous, nor that Nemerov's avoidance of the one is exposed as hypocritical by his acceptance of the other. But I will suggest this: a mystery is recognized partly by its ambiguity, by its resistance to the concise and formulaic reduction of its terms into another, simplistic set of terms. Ambiguity licenses multiple interpretations, and so do mysteries, whether secular or holy.

Ambiguity, then, is a property of the mysterious, and the mysterious, according to Nemerov, is a property of “the great masters.” So, with just a bit of sophistry, I would suggest that a touch of ambiguity is circulating among the great masters. But before I go any further with this, I want to suggest how Nemerov's hierarchical conception of metaphor can account, somewhat obliquely, I confess, for his own particular style of rambling and bumbling in the classroom. The explanation will be already familiar to many because it has dominated recent discussions concerning the canon of English and American writers. It goes: anyone who uses the title “great masters” is leaning heavily upon the vertical axis of critical pronouncement, upon a critical procedure designed not only to make distinctions between the various writers in question, but to determine the relative height of their stations. This phrase perfectly embodies the elitist view of the literary arts, but I am most emphatically not using the term “elitist” in its current pejorative sense. If I might return for a moment to the etymological history of the word and suggest that its origin in the Latin verb eligere, meaning “to elect,” emphasizes not its current connotation of unwarranted privilege but instead its older semantic of recognized authority, I might further suggest that when Nemerov opened one of his classes by announcing that literary accomplishment was entirely elitist in its structure and that the odds were against us—himself modestly but not sincerely, I think, included—in our bid to write memorable poetry, he was applying to his classroom the yardstick that he applied to his general reading. This was, and ever shall be, viewed by some as inappropriate or harsh, by others as inappropriate, harsh, and honest. As his essays attest, Nemerov had a distinctive voice in American literary criticism, and it was this voice, not the voice of the poet who hoped along with all of his students to write a fine poem, that spoke from behind the desk.

Nemerov read the poetry of his students the way he read all poetry—with high expectations and with high disappointment when his expectations were not met. It is significant too that, according to Nemerov in the passage quoted above, the highest reach of poetic accomplishment, that which “makes statements about invisible mysteries,” becomes very nearly religious in its orientation. Just as Nemerov obstinately termed this poetry “magical” (which is to say religious without the religion), so he spoke of Rebel's Rest as Rabbi's Roost and complained that you couldn't swing a cat at Sewanee without hitting a bishop. Such a refracted concern for the religious sensibility bespeaks an unfiltered intimacy as well, and when he spoke of this masterful poetry that “treats the world as a signature,” he entered, as he knew, the domain of patristic theology. If Nemerov believed what he wrote—and we must ultimately honor his choice of “magical”—then he at least assigned high purpose to his art. Someone once defined a student as the irreparable casualty of a pedagogical theory, but the poets in Nemerov's class at Sewanee were always certain of their relative places in his cosmology. And certainty, in any discipline, is never easily obtained.

But certainty, in its various tones and melodies, always stood out as a prominent feature of Nemerov's poetry and criticism. Even when his subject was death, or any of the other finalities that attend the mortal world, Nemerov regularly avoided the grand and imprecise statements that death so often occasions. His ability to view the invisible, as he termed it, reflected through the visible world structured poem after poem, none more characteristically, I think, than “Adoration,” included in Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991:

When I report at the funerals of friends,
Which happens nowadays oftener than it did,
I am astonished each time over again
At the fucking obsequiousness addressed to God:
O Thou, &c. He's killed this one already,
And is going to do the rest of us
In His own good time, then what in the world
Or out of it's abjection going to get
For either the dead or their smalltime survivors?
Who go to church at ordinary times
to pray to God, who does not go to church.
As for those masses and motets, no matter:
He happens to be tone deaf (or is it stone deaf?
My hearing's not so good either). But once in a way
The music takes me, if it doesn't Him,
The way Bach does the Et In Terra Pax,
Or Mozart does the Tuba Mirum, where
We doomed and damned go on beseeching anyhow.
Does He, when He hears that heavenly stuff, believe?
And at the Lacrimosa does He weep for us?
No end, my friends, to our inventiveness:
God doesn't matter. Adoration does.

Entirely typical here is Nemerov's closing gambit—rather than chatter on about Ineffable Death, Nemerov concentrates on the human particulars that noisily congregate around the final and lasting silence of our dying. Here he has chosen “those masses and motets,” and they allow him a certain conclusion: adoration matters. A good measure of grimness resides there, but that is the price Nemerov will pay for discovering an incontestable observation—drawn always from the world of human endeavor—about our incontestable end.

The importance of Trying Conclusions lies not only in the dozen new poems that appear under that title, but in the silent principles of selection that guided its formation. David Perkins has written in the second volume of his History of Modern Poetry that Nemerov “changed his style in the 1960s … [and] adopted an ideal of relaxed, meditative speech and plain realism,” and here in Trying Conclusions the selection begins with poems from The Next Room of the Dream, which appeared in 1962. Whether readers generally agree with Perkins' assessment or not, they will surely find it notable that five volumes of verse precede those volumes represented in this new selection. The earlier volumes are most easily obtained in The Collected Poems, which appeared in 1977, and Chicago will certainly keep that collection in print. It continues to serve now as the much needed companion volume.

At first blush, Perkins' assumption about Nemerov's verse feels accurate because we indiscriminately accept “relaxed, meditative, and plain” as part of the cultural shibboleths of that laid-back decade. And to a degree he is right. The first two stanzas from “Paraphrase from Notebooks” originally appeared in The Image and the Law (1947), Nemerov's first book of poetry, and they represent the kind of writing that would eventually be purged from Nemerov's developing body of work:

Well, the brilliance is gone,
Change in the weather chills.
Sometimes you feel you are alone
On a planet tilting from the sun.
Like the fall of nations in the mind
Soundless each leaf falls
Disturbing to some certain end
The leaves in patterns on the ground.

Had one of Nemerov's students written the second stanza, Nemerov might well have agreed that indeed it would be a terrible burden to have nations falling in one's mind and that, thank goodness, falling nations had been spared him. Nemerov left this sort of poetry behind, but so do all good young poets who become good old poets.

Perkins' comment paradoxically points to all of those plain poems that Nemerov wrote long before the 1960s set so many to talking about how plain and simple their lives might become. Even as a theme for poetry, forgetting for a moment matters of style, Nemerov got there early with his poem “Life Cycle of Common Man,” which appeared in New Poems (1960), his fifth collection; it enshrines the plain life of a plain man in distinctly plain language:

Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits,
This average consumer of the middle class,
Consumed in the course of his average life span
Just under half a million cigarettes,
Four thousand fifths of gin and about
A quarter as much vermouth; he drank
Maybe a hundred thousand cups of coffee,
And counting his parents' share it cost
Something like half a million dollars
To put him through life.

This is Nemerov's version of the Homeric catalog, and it perfectly represents the sensibility—domestically oriented—that would guide many of the best poems he proceeded to write. Though always in his way a barnstormer for poetry and the arts, Nemerov avoided, particularly as his career developed, the tones of prophetic solemnity that often accompany such cultural apologies, and what distinguishes the later work, showcased in Trying Conclusions, is Nemerov's insistence on recognizing that even if poetry has a clear and distinct social value, this value is never secured or advanced by arguing for the social value of poetry.

The poetry selected for Trying Conclusions issues from what Nemerov continually described as a simple respect for an audience who has—or at least ought to have, he always added—more pressing things to do than read his poems. The pose here is important. Austerity, obscurity, ambiguity—the harried reader has little time for these delicacies, however lofty their ultimate purpose, and their intolerance of these things, indeed their intolerance of modern poetry, makes a further point. It is possible that every Saturday afternoon when Americans choose to spend their time with Frank Gifford and not with Hart Crane—a choice that is made, I am confident, by millions over a season—it is just possible that a perfectly justifiable decision has been made. This is a proposition of interest to some poets, of no interest to others. But those who want to make something of it, and Nemerov was one of these, generally locate the matrix of their poetry within the public realm and so are often called, as Nemerov was, public poets.

That such an obscurity as contemporary poetry could be labeled public is a vanity that makes all other vanities totter. But if poetry is ever to make wishing credible, and if credibility is ever a standard of aesthetic judgment, then the deepest wish of Nemerov's poetry, particularly of the poems gathered together in Trying Conclusions, is that his poems aim ultimately to dignify the world of our recognizably common experience. Perhaps this constitutes public poetry, perhaps not. Because this volume makes available for the first time generous and judicious selections from the three books that followed The Collected Poems, readers now have in their possession some of the most approachable and intelligent verse written in the last decade, and as the decades multiply, so too will the praises accorded these poems. Of the twelve new ones written while Nemerov wore the laurel of his laureateship, the beginning of “Soundings” seems peculiarly apt:

Watching the TV with the sound turned off
May seem a foolish exercise enough
To them that haven't tried it, and to them that won't.
But as one or another philosopher may have said,
‘There's nothing so stupid I can't learn from it,’
And once or twice I've found its speechlessness
Instructive, leading on to memories
And thoughts, and thence to dreams and dreamless sleep.

The poem then draws its morals (“the essential nonsense of a world / Deprived of its word,” for example) and returns for a final glance at “these children of light the screen displays.” We are not told whether Frank Gifford appeared, but we are sure—and of what other poet could we say this so confidently?—that Nemerov's poetry could have made room for him.

While Nemerov was still alive, still in the process of becoming his admirers, it seemed inappropriate to speak of the humility of his verse because even his most long-standing advocates realized that humility, which is often accompanied by diffidence, was never the first and rarely the last impression that Nemerov left. But Trying Conclusions reveals a religious sensibility that is very nearly medieval in its informing humility. This is most obvious, primarily, in the choice of subject matter—anything in creation will do because there is always “a knowledge,” as Nemerov writes in “A Spell before Winter,” that resides “in the look of things.” Nothing is positioned so low on Nemerov's Chain of Being that it does not deserve his ennobling attention. And few other contemporary poets so regularly invoked the deity—as God, as Rabbi, as Priest, as Nature, as Warden of the Afterlife. Often, God's omnipotence and perfection are needed simply as conceptual counters to the particular weakness or dissatisfaction that structures the poem—“Adoration,” quoted above, provides a good example. Just as often, “Death” (as in “If Death should stroke thee, Thompson, scratch Him for me,” from “Elegy”) enters the poetry as an incomprehensible yet divinely ordained struggle that the poet finds by turn fearful, unknowable, and even amusing, a contest where the participants are having, as Nemerov said of the warring blue jay and mockingbird, “fun / Of a serious sort.”

Much of the verse is temperately skeptical, as in “Debate with the Rabbi,” which ends: “Instead of bowing down, said he, / You go on in your obstinacy. / We Jews are that way, I replied.” And much of it is ferociously skeptical, too. Eschatology must finally figure as one of Nemerov's guiding passions, and this disposition partly accounts for his enduring love of The Divine Comedy. “I want to teach a course someday,” he told me, “called the history of modern literature. On the first day of class, I will tell them to read everything that Dante wrote, and on the last day of class I will take up papers whose task will have been to describe what went wrong in the centuries that followed him.” The title poem of the collection is placed last, and the deep skepticism that defines the second section of the poem is only hinted at in the first section, where Nemerov's debt to Dante is once more, and for the last time, evident:

I.

There is a punishment too smart for Hell,
And it is this: some people here on earth
Have been so hot at prayer that when they come
At last to bliss eternal they cannot stop
Blessing, beseeching, praising His Holy Name.
They would spend eternity hunkered on their knees
Without a cushion, save that the Infinite
Of wisdom and mercy pities them in the end.
They are the ones He will send to be born again.

II.

What rational being, after seventy years,
When Scripture says he's running out of rope,
Would want more of the only world he knows?
No rational being, he while he endures
Holds on to the inveterate infantile hope
That the road ends but as the runway does.

Very little seems left to say; the intellectual precision of the flyboy returns in the last line of the poem to judge the rationality of an afterlife and finds it an “inveterate infantile hope”—not enough to chart a course by. But rationality, as we learned from Nemerov's essay “On Metaphor,” has a diminished role to play in our perception of the “invisible mysteries” made manifest by the heightened use of metaphor. These other sorts of knowledge, these hints and guesses, Nemerov spent his career delineating, and they need not be confined to the rational. Yet Nemerov's investment in the rational science of rhetoric was a heavy one, and he was led from poem to poem by what Roland Barthes, speaking of the aphorism, termed “the metrical economy of thought.” The notion of an afterlife, in such climates, struggles to survive. But, as he has given us to believe in the last poem that he published, “The End of the Opera,” such notions still reside in these public pageantries, and the applause that follows the performance amounts to a communal celebration: “As we applauded us,” the last line of the poem begins, and then continues, ending with the words of the Latin Mass: “ite missa est.” And so he did.

One of the last times I saw Nemerov at Sewanee, he was strolling away from the outdoor supper held under the expansive shade trees behind Bishop's Common. This was July of 1990, and before a year would pass, he would succumb to the disease that had already and obviously weakened him. His outfit for the evening would have sent a semiotician to an asylum: a pair of brightly colored trunks with yachting flags on the front which, when someone had earlier commented on the distinctive hue of his legs, he claimed represented the international distress signal; the Conference T-shirt topped by a hip-length blue jean jacket; and on the jacket's lapel, a tiny Confederate flag presented to him in jest by an admirer (he said he would have to remove the pin the moment he entered Missouri air space); on his feet, a pair of aqua-socks, neon in their intensity; and over his shoulder, the Harvard bag. I was sitting beside Wyatt Prunty, the director of the Conference, and he had called my attention to Nemerov, saying simply, “There's the model.”

Nemerov had paused, away from the crowd, and was staring up into a tree not a great deal taller than he was. A bird of some kind was fluttering nervously from branch to branch, and Nemerov stood there, head up and motionless; when the bird finally settled on one of the topmost limbs, it ran through a variety of melodies. Perhaps it was a mocking-bird. From where I sat, I could not say for certain. Nemerov stared back, still motionless. The bird presently had had enough, fell silent, and flew away. I was dimly aware that some kind of contest had just taken place, and that because Nemerov had shown who was master, he was heading home to write the poem. He ambled around the corner and vanished from our view.