The Architecture of Wit: A Profile of Howard Nemerov

Howard Nemerov was a poet of precision, a man who spent his life trying to, in his own words, 'get something right in language.' To understand Nemerov is to understand a rare intersection of high-altitude perspective and grounded, often ironic, observation. Born on a leap year—February 29, 1920—he seemed destined for a life that viewed the world through a slightly different lens. He was a New Yorker by birth, the son of a sophisticated family that owned a Fifth Avenue department store, and the brother of the legendary photographer Diane Arbus. While his sister captured the strange and the marginalized through a camera, Howard captured the complexities of the human condition through the strict, shimmering structures of formal verse.

His path to poetry was paved with the adrenaline of a pilot. During World War II, Nemerov served as a pilot in both the Royal Canadian Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Forces, flying combat missions over the North Sea. This experience of looking down at the earth from the cockpit deeply informed his poetic style. He became a poet of the 'overview,' yet one who never lost sight of the gritty, often tragic details below. His early work was heavily influenced by modern masters like T.S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, but he eventually shed these echoes to find a voice that was uniquely his: witty, philosophical, and intensely inquisitive.

Nemerov’s technical mastery is perhaps best seen in his ability to make the difficult look effortless. Consider his frequently anthologized poem, 'A Primer of the Daily Round.' It is an Elizabethan sonnet that manages to condense the chaos of human existence into an alphabetical sequence. He writes:

'A peels an apple, while B kneels to God,
C telephones to D, who has a hand
On E’s knee, F coughs, G turns up the sod
For H’s grave, I do not understand.'

This excerpt perfectly illustrates his signature style—a blend of everyday domesticity and profound existential doubt, wrapped in a tight, formal package. Critics often lauded his 'technical excellence' and 'intelligence,' though some occasionally dismissed him as too 'academic' or 'intellectualized.' Yet, for Nemerov, the intellect was not a barrier to emotion but the very tool used to excavate it. He was a 'man of letters' in the truest sense, serving twice as the U.S. Poet Laureate and winning the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize, all for his 1977 'Collected Poems.'

If you are coming to Nemerov for the first time, the poem to read is 'Because You Asked About The Line Between Prose And Poetry.' It is a short, six-line masterpiece that serves as a manifesto for his craft. In it, he observes sparrows feeding in the rain, and as the rain turns to snow, the birds begin to fly. He writes:

'Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
There came a moment that you couldn’t tell
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.'

This poem is the perfect introduction because it demonstrates Nemerov’s central innovation: the use of a simple, natural observation to explain a complex artistic concept. It shows his belief that poetry is a transformation—a moment where the ordinary 'falls' into the extraordinary.

Throughout his career, Nemerov remained a 'distinguished brooder.' He was the first poet to ever read before a joint session of the U.S. Congress, a testament to his status as a public intellectual who believed that poetry belonged at the center of national life. He lived much of his later life in St. Louis, teaching at Washington University and observing the world with a 'sarcastic triumph of the mind.' For poets and lovers of the craft, Howard Nemerov remains a vital architect of the English language, a writer who proved that within the rigid walls of a sonnet, there is enough room to house the entire, messy, beautiful world.