The Phoenix
“The Phoenix” concludes Howard Nemerov’s sec-
ond collection of poetry, Guide to the Ruins.Its
plainspoken and flat tone, its short lines, and its
subject matter of death and rebirth perfectly suit an
end poem. It is not only the final poem in this book;
Nemerov felt so strongly about the poem’s tone of
finality that he also used it to close his popular 1960
collection New and Selected Poems.“The Phoenix”
is sparse, ominous, and frightening, calling forth a
dead world of mythological beasts and powers of
which humans no longer are able to conceive. Iron-
ically, for a poem that conjures up such a sense of
foreboding and finality, the poem is one of the few
in the book that does not end with a period—it just
fades away, letting its final utterance (the word
“Word”) resonate in the reader’s mind.
Author Biography
Born in 1920 in New York City, Howard Nemerov
lived his early life in the city, and attended the ex-
clusive Fieldston School—where he was a fine stu-
dent and an excellent athlete—before matriculating
at Harvard. After graduating from Harvard in 1941,
Nemerov enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force,
then in the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force in Eng-
land. He was discharged in 1945. Immediately af-
ter the war, Nemerov and his English wife lived in
New York City, where Nemerov wrote The Image
and the Law,his first collection of poems, but they
Howard Nemerov
1950
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