SOURCE: Johnson, Tom. “Ideas and Order.” Sewanee Review 86 (summer 1978): 445-53.

[In the following review of Collected Poems and Figures of Thought, Johnson defends Nemerov against critics who have accused him of being too academic.]

Howard Nemerov is a poet known to most readers just well enough to be stereotyped. There are, in fact, two stereotypes regularly pasted upon his work. The first casts him as a good academic poet, which means that he teaches and writes criticism and that his poems are competent, intellectual, usually difficult, and usually dull. The second is by comparison unflattering; it is caught in the remark of an acquaintance who is an associate professor of English in a state university: he described Nemerov as a competent suburban poet. By which he meant, presumably, marginally competent, stuffy, hopelessly middleclass in concerns, unintellectual, and usually dull. This second attitude we shall dismiss, for the evidence will be seen to contradict all its points. The attitude is difficult to account for in Nemerov's actual poems (the ones one reads, rather than the ones one talks about at receptions) except in the vaporous hallways of the New York school, where poems are required to be aglow with non sequiturs.

The origins of the first attitude, which does represent some truth, are easy to discover. Nemerov is a teacher, and he writes criticism: the publication of Figures of Thought, his third collection of critical essays and addresses, close upon the release of the Collected Poems, is auspicious. Furthermore his poems are technically competent. Technical excellence is hard to come by among the poets of any age, but in ours the denial of it has often become a fetish. So let there be no ambiguity here: Nemerov is a master of the craft of poetry, and that is the way the highest praise must begin. One can find here, for example, a fine villanelle (“Equations of a Villanelle”), no mean task in English, in which the repetition of lines is used to turn the original proposition inside-out, like pulling the surface of a sphere through a small hole in itself. In a poem called “Sarajevo,” six stanzas of six lines apiece, the first line reappears in each stanza farther down, as though marching its way through the poem; at the end we are struck with a startling single change. The entire poem is a series of variations using terms and images taken from the figures in the first stanza:

In the summer, when the Archduke dies
Past the year's height, after the burning wheel
Steadies and plunges down the mountainside,
The days' succession fails from one to one
Still great as kings, whose shock troops in the field
Begin to burnish their green shoots to gold.

All of this, even the double entendre, transmuted and collected gradually through the course of the poem, becomes in the end one great diverse figure:

The wildly streaming past now falls to one
Plunge on the oldest number of the wheel,
The zero twice redeemed in suicide,
Last blood sport of the green civilian field
Where the old world's sun went down in gold
In the summer when the Archduke died.

The sound values and rhythms are sure; the poem seems to have fallen into place against incredible odds by a natural affinity of its images, like a building by the likeness of its stones.

Nemerov's prosody is eclectic, though conservatively so by contemporary standards. The influences of Stevens and Eliot are apparent by imitation in the early works, the influences of Milton and Yeats by suggestion in the later. He is most conservative in being partial to five-beat lines, from which he has drawn quite as much in the way of variety as anyone has in the thirty-six years since Four Quartets. This should not be taken as a limitation: in shorter lines he is capable of the sort of spare elegance that gets a man labelled, enviously, academic:

                              … I shall show you
A new thing: even the water
Flowing away beneath those birds
Will fail to reflect their flying forms,
And the eyes that see become as stones
Whence never tears shall fall again.

Even more than Jarrell he is a master of the American colloquial version of that English flatness of voice invented by an American and driven home by Auden. Frequently, perhaps too frequently, a line will flatten out to prose and the song will die in the ear. Yet it is slighting him to say that he knows the harmonies that make good verse fill even a reader's ear and afterward move in his mind. When he means to be at it, he can make the purest song, in which the idea is complete within the sound: “One snow will seal the sleepy cities up.”

The impression that Nemerov is intellectual begins in the observation that there are ideas in his poems, and the impression that he is usually difficult begins in the opinion that there are too many ideas. To build one's own poetry entirely out of his ideas is a dangerous business: it adds a high wind to what is already a long tightrope walk. That someone (Stevens) in our own century has got away with it has set, for too many, a fatal precedent. But Nemerov never goes this far. He merely accepts Stevens's proposition that one's ideas are quite properly an essential part of his life and therefore of his art. In Stevens's poems and essays the greatest word is imagination, which stands for everything that is valuable; in Nemerov's the word is thought, and it stands for—well, thought. There is always something more.

Not all Nemerov's ideas are easy ones. Sometimes there are more of them than a poem can handle. Frequently it seems that he is out to make a metaphor of everything in a poem, every image fitting into one scheme of reference and beginning another at the same time. This quality does make many poems difficult, and make many others seem more difficult than they really are; but it is not (as has often been said) the source of Nemerov's failure or of his success. In the scale of the Collected Poems we see this density of symbolic speech in both good poems and broken ones, and recognize it for what it is: part of his character, not one of his gimmicks: the essence of first-rate intelligence.

One of the hardest literary lessons of this century was that it is all right for poems to be difficult. Still every poet must qualify for this dispensation himself. And the indictment against Nemerov is even stronger: he writes about aesthetics, writing itself, and painting; his poems contain a density of allusion just as striking as their density of metaphor; he mixes funny things in with the serious ones. If we do object to the first of these we are in effect objecting to intelligence. And Nemerov knows painting. The same retorts can be offered concerning allusion; it was, after all, the issue over which the battle over modern poetry was joined. Nemerov's favorite referents are the works we call classics to excuse our not having read them well: the Bible, St. Augustine, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare. Nemerov's poems do not require high sensitivity to allusion: they expand in proper contexts, but are never obscure. So, in what is probably his most famous poem, “I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee,” he describes a woman in a strict “rig” of whalebone corsets (“all the tackle”) as being like “a great ship, coming home.” We can hardly miss the pressing allusions to the Book of Job and to Moby-Dick. Then we may, with luck, recall that in Samson Agonistes Milton first describes Samson's faith as a vessel “gloriously rigged,” then later calls Dalila “a stately ship of Tarsus … with all her bravery and tackle trim.” We may; but if we don't the poem retains its impact.

The matter of humor is a touchy point. The last century to stress wit and high seriousness in its aesthetic was the eighteenth—altogether too intellectual a time for modern tastes. Nemerov and his critics have squabbled over his frequent irreverent intrusions of humor for years, and he has confessed that he has “sometimes found it a strain to suffer critics gladly upon this issue in particular.” Too much has been made of it. A few of Nemerov's best poems and several of his good ones are built on direct humor, usually as irony. Thus, in “The Town Dump,” we find relics of things that were alive:

                              … the lobster, also, lifts
An empty claw in his most minatory
Of gestures; oyster, crab and mussel shells
Lie here in heaps, savage as money hurled
Away at the gate of hell. If you want results,
These are results.

Still the majority of his best poems, even though they may contain irony, do not rely on it; nor on puns or inversions. Seldom, in fact, have the critics who objected flatly to humor been distinguishable from the ones who claimed that in otherwise sound poems the humor had degenerated to wit, that is, to cleverness and slyness for their own sake. If humor is important to Nemerov (and it is), that is none of our concern; we are concerned with the poems themselves. And without entering the battle over specifics in the larger poems, I will admit, by way of abandoning this issue, that many of Nemerov's short poems, his throwaways, are merely witty. But wit, like other forms of cleverness, is an indulgence of intelligence; and if wit is a triviality, we should add that all poets produce trivial pieces and that most of these have not even wit to recommend them.

Because densely metaphorical speech becomes a natural expression for Nemerov's continuously flowering thought, complexly interacting metaphors using recurring images, like the ones in “Sarajevo,” are favorites of his. He varies the import of his images in much the same way that a composer performs variations on a theme. This technique is explicitly set out in two fine long poems, “The Scales of the Eyes” and “Runes,” in both of which the variations are separated into numbered sections. The first of these is called a “text and variations,” and its diction and meters are formal, precise, and highly charged—

The quiet pool, if you will listen,
Hisses with your blood, winds
Together vine and vein and thorn,
The thin twisted threads red
With the rust of breath.

—poetry in the grand, which is to say the Miltonic, manner. “Runes” is more relaxed, quietly meditative:

This is about the stillness in moving things,
In running water, also in the sleep
Of winter seeds, where time to come has tensed
Itself, enciphering a script so fine
Only the hourglass can magnify it, only
The years unfold its sentence from the root.

The working out of these ideas is not so intricately formed as in “The Scales of the Eyes”; the loose-hanging threads are manifestly part of the design. And so it is like our own experiences. In the smooth insistent pervasion of its reorderings, the poem itself embodies that ineffable mixture of form and flow which is our lives. And having made, not described, the vision of these two things as one, he says:

It is a secret. Or it is not to know
The secret, but to have it in your keeping,
A locked box, Bluebeard's room, the deathless thing
Which it is death to open. Knowing the secret,
Keeping the secret—herringbones of light
Ebbing on the beaches, the huge artillery
Of tides—it is not knowing, it is not keeping,
But being the secret hidden from yourself.

These are not metaphysical speculations. If some of them are difficult, and some are, it is because life is difficult to apprehend. But then, as Nemerov frequently shows, that is why it remains interesting. We perceive, if only through the persistence of irony, that his strongest sense is both humanistic and pessimistic. Looking at the statues of the great, he says

Children, to be illustrious is sad.
Do not look up. Those empty eyes are stars,
Their glance the constellation of the mad
Who must be turned to stone.

He trusts reason by default, like an existentialist who would rather have believed. The many religious images are part of the great striving. The loss of a usable rationalism is our common tragedy: in “Endegeeste,” working across the street from Descartes's house, now an insane asylum, he is careful to touch the ironic figure gently:

I keep my reasonable doubt as gay
As any—though on the lawn they seem to say,
Those patient, nodding heads, “sum, ergo sum.”
The elms' long shadows fall cold in my room.

In poems such as “First Snow,” “Drawing Lessons,” and “The First Day” Nemerov has written more incisively of science and its place in our imaginations than anyone else has yet managed to do in good (or even readable) poems. And in poems such as “A Spell before Winter” he has succeeded in writing about nature at once sharply seen and felt, as both Emerson and Frost tried to do and failed.

After the red leaf and the gold have gone,
Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain
Bruised and discolored, when October's flame
Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land
Sinks deeper into silence, darker into shade.

What is common to these themes is not abstraction, but rather, consistently, the most human of concerns—the difficulty of our decisions, of our sharing, of our knowing; the certainty of our suffering. The breadth of accomplishment and depth of insight are one's most striking impressions from first readings of the Collected Poems, enriched later by the humor, the intricacy, the grace. Jarrell, Roethke, Berryman, Wilbur, Lowell—these are the other members of Nemerov's generation (all dead but one, all much honored). Lowell loved to rate the fullness of work of poets; this book places Nemerov beside him as the major poets of their generation.

The title essay in Figures of Thought is a polemic against fraudulent and self-conscious intellectualizing. Actually it is a review, the only one Nemerov chose to put into this book, so its choice as title-piece is doubly significant. Nemerov wants his readers to see clearly the difference between what he considers useful, even creative, critical thought, which is the subject of the rest of the book, and what he perceives as a fashion for pretentious muddling passing as understanding. The subject is Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (although the review does conclude with a brief complimentary notice of Denis Donoghue's Thieves of Fire). Nemerov does not quarrel with Bloom's central thesis, which he renders as “poets are influenced by the poets who have gone before them.” Nor is he entirely unwilling to accept Bloom's choice of a Freudian model to explain the mechanism of this influence. But he does object to practically everything else, principally to the paucity of ideas in Bloom's staggeringly overcomplicated terminology, and to the nonsense of the terminology itself: “The effort to render English unintelligible is proceeding vigorously at the highest levels of learning.” He first examines Bloom's prose to see if the sentences themselves, taken individually, make literal sense. He then attempts to analyze Bloom's logical arguments to decide if they withstand the simplest tests of consistency. Finally he tries to decide what evidence might verify Bloom's assertions, or whether we can say whether specific evidence which might do so exists. His conclusions from each of these processes are, respectively, Usually Not, Seldom, and No. Although the tone of his own critical prose is characteristically light—“If you took the key sentence beginning with what he means (‘I mean …’) and removed that parenthesis during which you spent three weeks in the stacks, you would still not be quite out of the woods”—his arguments are sound and compelling.

One other piece in the book (“Quidnunc the Poet and Mr. Gigadibs”) addresses, in less striking terms, the decay of critical language and perspective. Of the remaining fifteen essays two are more specifically critical works, one on Dante and one on Joyce; eight are concerned with poetry itself, its nature, methods, history, and future; two are about paintings; and three come in a special category of rumination which we may call pure speculation. One of the essays in this last category is entitled “On the Resemblances between Science and Religion”: its observations, though fun, are facile and a bit overdrawn: it reads like a transcript of good after-dinner conversation. Another, “About Time,” poses some interesting questions, but, again, passes into rambling. The third is well described by its title, “Speculation Turning to Itself”: it addresses, intelligently and intelligibly, questions of self-reference in our means of perceiving and knowing and defining. One wishes that there were more of it.

The two essays on painting are lucid and instructive. The essay on Dante is scholarly in the unpejorative sense of the word: it reaches deep. To one's immediate relief the essay on Joyce is not scholarly. “Thoughts on First Passing the Hundredth Page of Finnegans Wake” presents the first observations of an intelligent man in that precarious position without attempting to dismay the reader with the mechanics of his getting there. One has two senses simultaneously: first of wanting for the first time to read Finnegans Wake, whether or not one has already read it; and second of that reading's being no longer necessary. The latter sense, of course, is a fraud, but not Nemerov's fraud.

The heart of the book is the eight essays (most, perhaps all of them, were apparently addresses) on poetry. They are the longest pieces in the book, and any two of them contain enough original propositions to start an entire book for most critics: the density of ideas in this, Nemerov's most serious criticism, reflects (for good reason) the density of metaphor and allusion in his poems. The style is at once urbane and colloquial: the expression is sophisticated, but the language is the simplest that can be made to do. These essays are genuinely intended to be understood. Their range can be inferred from a list of poets whose works, in the course of elucidating particular themes or hypotheses, are analyzed in some detail: Yeats, Dante, Herbert, Auden, Jarrell, Shakespeare, William Carlos Williams.

The depth of these eight essays can hardly be conveyed without extensive quotations or equally extensive paraphrases. But their nimbleness and originality can be strongly hinted at by a brief example from an essay entitled “The Winter Addresses of Kenneth Burke.” “First off, it will be convenient to have the text before us.” Whereupon Nemerov lists two ordinary looking street addresses, marked with line numbers, and says of them: “One imagines that even a superficial reader will respond immediately to the appeal of this muted little lyric, so full as it is of verbal play, subtle variation, and incremental repetition.” You can't miss where this is going, and for three pages he draws out a brilliant delicious parody of close reading, finding all sorts of metaphorical connections and implications among the street and city names and numbers.

Then Nemerov pauses in the joke and tells you how, superficially, he came to make it. He begins to wonder about that how, and about why precisely it is a joke, and then he makes an unsettling suggestion:

I shall go further now, and assert that the two addresses have become a poem, though they weren't one before, largely in virtue of my having read things into them; things that are now there even if they weren't there before. … It's a joke, if you like, but it's a pretty dirty joke. This is so for a reason that is rarely if ever said aloud, maybe because when said aloud it becomes self-evident: that interpretation, of its nature, is or at least overlaps with misinterpretation; were that not so, it would be either fact or revelation.

Isn't this what Bloom says—the poem as a “map of misreading”? No, because, as Nemerov goes on to say and then to illustrate beautifully, the poem begins not in other poems, but in the world itself—even the poem of his deliberate misinterpretations.

This is a lot to swallow without the evidence and argument that Nemerov provides. And this one is the slightest of all the essays on poetry. The series of three large pieces (under the general title “What Was Modern Poetry?”) on the themes and methods of modern verse do more than anyone yet has to consolidate the gains of this century's many literary revolutions. And that by itself makes this a remarkable book.