"I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants." -- Howard Nemerov
Howard Nemerov (29 February 1920 — 5 July 1991) was an American poet, twice appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1963 to 1964, and again from 1988 to 1990. He received the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize for The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov. He was brother to photographer Diane Nemerov Arbus and father to art historian Alexander Nemerov, Professor of the History of Art and American Studies at Yale University.
"A chronicle is very different from history proper.""A lot happens by accident in poetry.""A teacher is a person who never says anything once.""For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.""History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.""I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.""I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.""I have a plot, but not much happens.""I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.""I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.""I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.""I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.""I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.""I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.""I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.""I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.""It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.""Language cares.""Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.""Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.""Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.""Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?""Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.""Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.""Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.""Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.""The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.""The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.""The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.""The spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me, so it's fairly even.""We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.""When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.""When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.""When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.""When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.""Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time."
Born on leap day in New York City, his parents were David Nemerov and Gertrude. His younger sister was the photographer Diane Arbus. The elder Nemerov's talents and interests extended to art connoisseurship, painting, philanthropy, and photography — talents and interests undoubtedly influential upon his son. Young Howard was raised in a sophisticated New York City environment where he attended the Society for Ethical Culture's Fieldston School. Graduated in 1937 as an outstanding student and second string team football fullback, he commenced studies at Harvard University where, in 1940, he was Bowdoin Essayist and he received bachelor's degree at this university. Throughout World War II, he served as a pilot, first in the Royal Canadian Air Force and later the U. S. Army Air Forces. He married in 1944, and after the war, having earned the rank of first lieutenant, returned to New York with his wife to complete his first book.
Nemerov then began teaching, first at Hamilton College and later at Bennington College, Brandeis University, and finally Washington University in St. Louis, where he was Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor of English and Distinguished Poet in Residence from 1969 until his death in 1991. Nemerov's numerous collections of poetry include Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991 (University of Chicago Press, 1991); The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize; The Winter Lightning: Selected Poems (1968); Mirrors and Windows (1958); The Salt Garden (1955); and The Image of the Law (1947). His novels have also been commended; they include The Homecoming Game (1957), Federigo: Or the Power of Love (1954), and The Melodramatists (1949).
Nemerov received many awards and honors, among them fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and The Guggenheim Foundation, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the National Medal of Arts, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and the first Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.
Nemerov served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1963 and 1964, as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets beginning in 1976, and as poet laureate of the United States from 1988 to 1990. In 1990 he was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame. Nemerov died of cancer in 1991 in University City, Missouri. The Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award was instituted in 1994 to honor him, and by 2008 about 3000 sonnets were entered annually in the associated competition.
Nemerov's work is formalist. He has written almost exclusively in fixed forms and meter. While he is known for his meticulousness and refined technique, his work also has a reputation for being witty and playful. He is compared to John Hollander and Philip Larkin.
"A Primer of the Daily Round" is his most frequently anthologized poem, and highly representative of Nemerov's poetic style. It is an archetypal Elizabethan sonnet, demonstrative of the prosodic creativity for which Nemerov is famous.
