Howard Nemerov, one of our country’s titans of literature, died last July. He published his first book shortly after Wodd War II, and during the next 44 years a stream of 26 books garnered for him the country’s most prestigious awards. He won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer in 1978 for his Collected Poems, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1981, and the National Medal for the Arts in 1987. Our third Poet Laureate for the years 1988-90, Nemerov was a consummate man of letters who excelled in several literary genre.

His essays range in subject matter from Dante and Shakespeare to Thomas Mann and Proust, from computers to painting, and his exquisite insights have been happily free of the self-isolating jargon that has lately typified this field. The body of Nemerov’s criticism alone would be the envy of those who solely pursue this activity.

His achievement in poetry looms largest in the public mind, and it was his poetry that has been responsible for most of his awards. Of another poet Nemerov has written: “I prefer poems which want to be read hard and which respond to the closest attention . . . it is a matter rather of how you approach one thought through another with an effect of surprise; a matter of the steepness of the gradient between the immediate and the inferred.” The gradient of Nemerov’s own work is sometimes steep indeed, but the surprise at the end of the slope is partly what draws readers to him. He is a poet who has read widely and deeply and who is aware of literary history and traditions. Unlike some, he does not think that he has invented himself 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 his work that greatly expands Nemerov’s vision and, perhaps, excludes some of his audience: how can they respond if they are only vaguely aware of such problems as the challenges of scientism or of positivism?

Detractors have claimed that the poetry is “academic” and “over-intellectualized.” If the reader is looking for a response to the world in extravagantly sensuous terms, he will be disappointed—yet so many of Nemerov’s best poems respond to “deep sayings” found in wild nature. That there might have been a mixed response in the romantic 60’s and 70’s could have been expected. Nemerov is not promising apocalypse, or millennium; and he was no darling of the talk shows. He has noted in a poem entitled “To the Bleeding Hearts Association of American Novelists” that there are writers who “slop their ketchup in the statue’s wounds / And advertise that blood as from the heart.” He concludes, “I like those masters better who expound / More inwardly the nature of our loss, / And only offhand let us know they’ve found / No better composition than a cross.” It is the latter that we have come to expect in his own verse.

Nemerov’s fiction is no small accomplishment, either, especially the three novels, Federigo, or the Power of Love, The Melodramatists, and The Homecoming Game, which has been turned into a movie. Thomas Mann praised Nemerov’s fiction as work of “keen imagination.” All the novels had been out of print for some time, but are now being reissued by the University of Missouri Press.

Often a reader feels that Nemerov is working in a fashion analogous to subatomic physicists, tracking the illusive, phantom-like trails of a world beyond ordinary sight, revealing the deep down things while at the same time sharing these discoveries with wonder and humility. Above all, his work is about something. The poems and fiction are not merely exercises in technical virtuosity.

About Vermeer, another master, Nemerov has written: “Taking what is, and seeing it as it is, / Pretending to no heroic stances or gestures, / Keeping it simple; being in love with light.” So he has done and been himself, which is no mean epitaph.