[In the following introductory chapter to a book-length study of Nemerov, Mills notes that his purpose will be to align Nemerov's thinking with the philosophical trends of his age.]

Howard Nemerov once remarked “for good or ill nobody seems to have much to say about what I write. They either dislike it rather harshly, or say it's underrated and very fine … but that's about it.” Happily, this situation is changing, and one does not need long vision to see that, during the seventies, readings of Nemerov may well appear on the scene with a surge resembling that in Stevens criticism during the fifties and sixties.

When I first undertook this study, there was no extended investigation of Nemerov's poetry in sight. Since that time, however, Julia Bartholomay has published her fine book, The Shield of Perseus: The Vision and Imagination of Howard Nemerov.¹ Unaware of her work for some time, I continued my own, completing it with a consideration of the light shed by Nemerov's newest volume, Gnomes & Occasions. When I did come upon Ms. Bartholomay's work, I was naturally interested to see whether we had followed the same avenues of investigation. In the main, 1 concluded, we had not; she has considered the poet's vision through a study of his imagery. Although Ms. Bartholomay and I have pursued different lines of inquiry, and sometimes have reached different conclusions, her analyses of particular poems (especially the “Runes” sequence) are very fine and would be most helpful to any student of Nemerov.²

I have chosen to consider Nemerov's poetry in terms of certain subject matters, in the hope that these divisions might serve to interest new readers (since we are often initially drawn to a person's work for this very reason). And, more importantly, I was engaged by the unique way in which Nemerov approaches these subject matters. There is, of course, the danger of reducing the poems to the particular categories I have chosen, but any point of view has its attendant limitations. Violence will be done to the poems, but it is a real question whether this can ever be avoided in criticism. (And no one has written more eloquently on this question than Joseph Riddel in his study of William Carlos Williams, The Inverted Bell.³ It is my hope that these “violences” will offer a starting point for reflections.

There will no doubt be profitable studies in the future that will attend to placing Nemerov in relation to his contemporaries and to tradition. I have not undertaken such an investigation; indeed, I think it is likely too early for such work to be fruitful. But, as to twentieth-century movements, Nemerov is clearly a child of his age, specifically an age that includes Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Nemerov, while dialoguing with “the stillness in moving things,” is concurrently dialoguing with his fathers Stevens and Williams, to be sure, and because of his learning, with those of literary tradition in general. He is, too, in that direct line of descent from Donne and the Metaphysicals, with his penchant for metaphors found in the “new science,” his wit and love of punning and jokes.

There has been a fair amount of reaction to the poet (though not necessarily to the poems) in the literary quarterlies, and a summary of the reception of his books is readily available in Bowie Duncan's helpful volume The Critical Reception of Howard Nemerov.⁴ Duncan observes in his introduction that there has been a contradictory critical response. Detractors claim the poetry is “academic” and “over-intellectualized,” while admirers think of it as “self-reflexive and multifaceted.” Both responses are no doubt grounded partially in taste. If one is looking for a response to the world in extravagantly sensuous terms, he will be disappointed with Nemerov's poetry—yet so many of his best poems respond to “deep sayings” found in wild nature. That there might be a mixed response in the romantic sixties could have been expected. Nemerov is not promising apocalypse, or millennium; and he is no darling of the television talk shows.

Julia Bartholomay has observed that “representing no poetic school or movement, Nemerov stands apart in his generation—a giant, if a lonely one, who continues to shun identification with literary fads and bandwagons. Although Louise Bogan cited his work as ‘an example of the well-written intelligently ordered poetry that has been termed “academic” by the experimentalists’ (and called ‘mandarin’ by Kenneth Rexroth), Nemerov has not engaged in the cold war between the ‘New England Poets’ (academicians) and the ‘Black Mountain/Beat Group,’ representing the short-lived San Francisco Renaissance and the confessional poetry of the fifties and sixties.”⁵ And for others to describe Nemerov, or any poet, as academic is almost meaningless (unless one decides to use the term as entirely pejorative) when one considers those attached to academies and the spectrum they reveal: from Theodore Roethke, James Dickey, Charles Olson, to Robert Creeley, John Berryman, William Stafford, Richard Wilbur, J. V. Cunningham, and so on.

As I have maintained throughout much of this study, one of Howard Nemerov's importances to us as twentieth-century readers is that his vision has been shaped by a way of seeing, listening, and saying that reflects in turn his own listening to other thinkers' thinking. There are real poets in our time who have been much less aware of certain modern dilemmas and crises, but it is this added dimension of Nemerov's poetry that greatly expands his vision (and which, perhaps, excludes some of his audience: how can they respond if they are only vaguely aware of such problems as the challenges of scientism and some forms of positivism).

Early in Nemerov's work it was clear that he shared with some of his contemporaries a concern for the problem of how we know what we know. After his third volume of poetry, The Salt Garden, this concern was omnipresent. As his way of looking at the world evolved it seems to have come more and more to resemble that of phenomenologists, specifically Husserl and his student Heidegger. It is not an accident that a poet should share some of the same concerns of these two philosophers. A poet might well feel threatened and of little value, for example, if the Cartesian view that mind through reason could apprehend objective reality was unassailable. Hume hardly helped matters by saying that the mind knew nothing at all. Kant, of course, met the problem, and to some extent, Husserl and Heidegger moved from his work to positions that are crucially different. Initially I turned to Husserl and his interpreters to confirm this approach to Nemerov, and after reading Riddel's Inverted Bell, my attention was directed to certain works of Heidegger (particularly On the Way to Language⁶). What struck me were the similarities in Nemerov's and Heidegger's vision, and sometimes language. Such similarities will hopefully be apparent enough that the recognition will prompt further investigation by others.

The importance of phenomenology and Heidegger for poets is that such a thing as lyric poetry would not be shunned as some kind of mere expressive meaning, or pseudostatement, but would in fact be regarded as authentic statement. Scientific knowledge is not considered the only kind of statement with real value. The poet becomes very important, especially for a time which Heidegger would call the “midnight of the world.” Poetry is respectful of things in a way that scientism is not. Thus, in a very important way, Nemerov speaks to us and reminds us, as he writes in “The Blue Swallows,” that “Finding again the world, / That is the point, where loveliness / Adorns intelligible things. …”

I have not included any biographical summary, for both Duncan and Bartholomay have such summaries. Presently Nemerov is teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. One of the most important biographical events, as far as Nemerov's audience is concerned, was his move in 1948 to Vermont, where he taught at Bennington College until 1966. From this landscape have come many of his finest poems. It seems to have been here that Nemerov began to “listen” so attentively to nature, “to find again the world.” What I would like to argue is that “listening” for Nemerov (what he calls his “aural imagination”) is clearly similar to the “listening” Heidegger urges. Nemerov does not mean, I contend, “aural” in the sense of hearing the sound of a car or a bird; if he did one might expect a preponderance of honking and chirping in the poems. Rather, he means an imagination that has opened itself up to being, has stopped and listened to being. In this way the imagination is the agent of reality. The rhythm that he speaks of hearing is the rhythm of being.

There is another side to the poetry, one that appears when the poet senses and/or becomes enraged at inauthentic behavior or “idle” talk. This might be a minister seeing a boom in religion as a result of increased affluence, as related in the poem “Boom!”—or groundless talk, hearsay, and gossip becoming the false basis for foolish, and destructive, action. I have discussed the poetry that engages such inauthentic activity in the chapter entitled “The Urban Landscape.” Though there are those readers who see Nemerov's work as deeply divided, the poet himself feels that at bottom there is a unity. And it may be that such a unity exists as two sides of a coin: language mirroring authentic experience; or language mirroring nothing at all, and as such meaningless.

It is perhaps to be expected that a poet who writes such a self-reflexive poetry would write about poetry itself, that he would be intensely concerned with language and metaphor. The problem involving language's relation to person (or poet) and thing is being vigorously pursued today and has been vigorously pursued in the past. Nemerov participates in this saying about Saying, and as I have attempted to show, sometimes takes over the language of language philosophy and, in particular, Heideggerian analysis. He echoes Heidegger's observation that “Poetry and thinking are modes of saying. The nearness that brings poetry and thinking together into neighborhood we call Saying. Here, we assume, is the essential nature of language. ‘To say,’ related to the Old Norse ‘sage,’ means to show: to make appear, set free, that is, to offer and extend what we call World, lighting and concealing it. This lighting and hiding proffer of the world is the essential being of Saying.”⁷

If Heidegger is correct in his notion that poetry is in touch with the ground of being, that language, and especially the language of poetry, gives authentic being to things, and if it is also true that Nemerov is responding in such a way to being, to “the stillness in moving things,” then perhaps Nemerov may be considered much more than the “poet of minimal affirmation” he has been labeled.⁸

Notes

1. Julia Bartholomay, The Shield of Perseus: The Vision and Imagination of Howard Nemerov (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1972).

2. Within the presentation of my own argument I will refer the reader to Bartholomay's discussions when they seem appropriate.

3. Joseph N. Riddel, The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Counterpoetics of William Carlos Williams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974).

4. Bowie Duncan (ed.), The Critical Reception of Howard Nemerov: A Selection of Essays and a Bibliography (Metuchen, N. J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1971). This book is a valuable reference tool; its bibliography is succinctly annotated, and the essays include both overview responses to Nemerov and particular responses to individual volumes.

5. Bartholomay, Shield of Perseus, 4-5.

6. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

7. Ibid., 93.

8. Duncan (ed.), The Critical Reception of Howard Nemerov, 29.