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| Howard Nemerov | |
|---|---|
| Name | Howard Nemerov |
| Birth date | January 29, 1920 |
| Birth place | New York City |
| Death date | December 5, 1991 |
| Death place | Nashua, New Hampshire |
| Occupation | Poet, Professor |
| Nationality | United States |
| Notable works | "The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov", "The Pillar of Fire" |
| Awards | Poetry National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress |
Howard Nemerov was an American poet, essayist, and professor known for formal craft, wit, and philosophical range. He served as United States Poet Laureate and received major honors including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award. His career bridged mid-20th-century movements, engaging contemporaries and institutions across American letters.
Born in New York City in 1920 into a family connected to business and art, Nemerov was the son of photographer David Nemerov and the sibling of Diane Arbus and Willard Nemerov. He attended Columbia University briefly before transferring to Yale University, where he was influenced by faculty and peers associated with modern and classical traditions. Following graduation he studied in the context of interwar and wartime literary circles that included figures from Harvard University and Princeton University milieus. His formative years coincided with cultural developments tied to World War II, the Great Depression, and urban artistic communities in Manhattan.
Nemerov emerged in the 1940s and 1950s publishing in journals and collections alongside poets active in The New Yorker networks, Poetry magazine, and university press lists such as Harvard University Press and Yale University Press. He taught at institutions including Wesleyan University, Brooklyn College, and later at Washington University in St. Louis and University of Houston, interacting with colleagues from Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University. His work was discussed by critics at The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, and academic venues like the Modern Language Association conferences. He served in the United States Army during World War II, an experience that informed poems published in collections alongside works from contemporaries such as Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, John Ashbery, and Robert Lowell.
Nemerov's poetry often blends formal meter and rhyme with colloquial diction, evoking traditions traced to John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Hardy, while conversing with modernists including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W. H. Auden. His thematic range covers perception, mortality, ethics, and the relation between observer and observed—concerns shared with Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and James Merrill. Nemerov used dramatic monologue and persona techniques familiar to readers of Robert Browning and Sylvia Plath, and his ironic distance aligns him with poets such as Anthony Hecht and Adrienne Rich. Formal clarity and moral seriousness in his verse draw comparisons to Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, and R. S. Thomas.
Major collections include "Claim on the Night" and "The Collected Poems" as well as the long poem "The Pillar of Fire", a sequence that engages narrative and philosophical inquiry in the manner of epic and retelling like works by Dante Alighieri and John Milton. He published critical prose and essays alongside poetry in venues associated with Harper & Row, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and academic presses. His poems appeared in anthologies with pieces by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Langston Hughes. Individual poems such as "The War in the Air" and "Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry" circulated in periodicals including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Harper's Magazine.
Nemerov received the Poetry National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; he was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (often called United States Poet Laureate), joining predecessors and successors like Howard Craft and contemporaries such as John Crowe Ransom and William Stafford. He earned fellowships from organizations including the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and was awarded honorary degrees from universities like Yale University, Columbia University, and Dartmouth College. His honors placed him among laureates including Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Levine, and Stanley Kunitz.
Nemerov's personal life intersected with figures in visual art and literature; his sister Diane Arbus became a noted photographer associated with Village Voice circles and the Museum of Modern Art. He maintained friendships and debates with contemporaries at Mount Holyoke College conferences and literary gatherings at venues such as The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Politically and philosophically he engaged with questions prominent in postwar America, conversing with thinkers linked to Columbia University seminars and public intellectuals appearing on platforms like The New York Review of Books. His Jewish heritage informed some familial and cultural contexts alongside the secular humanist currents shared with peers such as Delmore Schwartz.
Nemerov's influence persists in university syllabi at institutions including Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, and Stanford University where his work is taught alongside T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Frost. Scholars and critics from departments at University of Chicago, University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University continue to publish on his craft, while poets in the lineage from Richard Wilbur to Mary Karr cite his balance of form and moral inquiry. Archives with his manuscripts are held in collections connected to Library of Congress and university libraries that curate papers by American poets including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens. His place in anthologies and curricula ensures ongoing engagement by readers and researchers across the anglophone world.
Category:American poets Category:1920 births Category:1991 deaths