Howard Nemerov (29 February 1920 – 5 July 1991) was 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.
Biography
Born 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.
Poetry
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
Phillip 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.
Bibliography
Poetry- The Image of the Law (1947)
- Mirrors and Windows (1958)
- The Winter Lightning: Selected Poems (1968)
- The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977) ISBN 9780226572598
- Sentences (1980) ISBN 9780226572628
- War Stories: Poems about Long Ago and Now (1987) ISBN 9780226572437
- Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991 (1992) ISBN 9780226572635
- Grace to be Said at the Supermarket
Prose- The Melodramatists (1949)
- Federigo: Or the Power of Love (1954)
- The Homecoming Game (1957)
- Journal of the Fictive Life (1965) ISBN 9780226572611
