Volume 10 233
Phoenix” first appeared) is indicative of the con-
troversy that followed Nemerov throughout his ca-
reer. Vivienne Koch, in her review “The Necessary
Angels,” applauded Nemerov’s “ingenuity” and
“sharp intellectual control.” I. L. Salomon, on the
other hand, was less generous in “Corruption and
Metaphysics,” calling Nemerov “A university wit
[who has] stifle[d] his considerable gifts by ex-
ploiting not the excellence but the defects his mas-
ters (Eliot, Auden, Tate) have imposed on a gen-
eration of poets.”
Whatever professional readers might have be-
lieved, for Nemerov, thinking and feeling were not
so easily distinguished, and in poetry, at least, they
were not independent operations. He opens his es-
say “Poetry and Meaning” with a definition of po-
etry: “What I have to say to you is very simple; so
simple that I find it hard to say. It is that poetry is
getting something right in language, that this idea
of rightness in language is in the first place a feel-
ing, which does not in the least prevent it from ex-
isting.” Nemerov implies that poetry reveals fun-
damental truths, and he argues that we intuit
poetry’s accuracy about these truths rather than
consciously recognize them.
Nemerov was himself more successful in his
mature poems than in his earlier ones at getting
something right in language. Most, though by no
means all, critics agree that Nemerov’s skills as a
poet improved markedly over the first two decades
of his career. Part of his improvement came as he
began to explore an ever-increasing range of sub-
jects, forms, and emotions. However, even though
he was more than what the title “academic poet”
would suggest, Nemerov was at his best when he
remained true to his philosophical roots, allowing
sensation to arrive through intellectual inquiry. For
instance, in “The Measure of Poetry,” a prose poem
from 1975, Nemerov compares poetry to an ocean
wave and confides that “It is the power, not the ma-
terial, which is transmitted.”
“Because You Asked about the Line between
Prose and Poetry” stands as an even more com-
pelling reflection on the nature of poetry. In this
poem, published in 1980, Nemerov likens sparrows
to snowflakes and snowflakes to poems, and he
identifies the boundary between prose and verse as
follows: “There came a moment that you couldn’t
tell. / And then they clearly flew instead of fell”
(Sentences). Although Nemerov wrote novels as
well as poetry, he still found it difficult to name the
difference between the literary genres. Instead, he
offers through his metaphor the idea that poetic lan-
guage “flies” while prose “falls,” and declines to
elaborate further. Nemerov’s delicate use of rhyme
anchors the elusive concept which he tries to ar-
ticulate, and the rhyme also provides an example
of the way in which poetry does not tumble forth
passively like prose, but instead is arranged more
actively and deliberately.
Some of the rhymes in “The Phoenix”—such
as “myrrh” / “bier”—are similarly elegant and
provocative; but some—like “Sun” / “one” and
“bird” / “Word”—are more remarkable for their
predictability. Perhaps this is appropriate, in so far
as the predictable rhymes may parallel the regular
cycle of the life and death of the phoenix. This leg-
endary creature and its deeds are detailed in a par-
ticularly useful account composed by the ancient
Greek historian Herodotus. In his Histories,writ-
ten in the fifth-century B.C., Herodotus provides
documentation of a “sacred bird ... the phoenix; I
have not seen a phoenix myself, except in paint-
ings, for it is very rare and visits the country (so
they say at Heliopolis) only at intervals of 500
years, on the occasion of the parent-bird. To judge
by the paintings, its plumage is partly golden, partly
red, and its shape and size is exactly like an eagle.
There is a story about the phoenix which I do not
find credible; it brings its parent in a lump of myrrh
all the way from Arabia and buries the body in the
temple of the sun. To perform this feat, the bird
first shapes some myrrh into a sort of egg as big as
it finds, by testing, that it can carry; then it hollows
the lump out, puts its father inside and smears someThe PhoenixNemerov’s delicate
use of rhyme anchors the
elusive concept which he
tries to articulate, and the
rhyme also provides an
example of the way in
which poetry does not
tumble forth passively like
prose, but instead is
arranged more actively and
deliberately.”