Collected Poems
by Howard Nemerov
Summary
Collected Poems gathers several decades of Howard Nemerov's work into a single volume, poetry written almost entirely in fixed forms and meter at a time when much of American poetry had moved decisively toward free verse, and it shows a poet using that traditional discipline for wit, satire, and genuinely serious thought about mortality and time rather than for ornament.
The book includes "A Primer of the Daily Round," one of Nemerov's most widely reprinted poems, an Elizabethan style sonnet whose title alone signals its method: taking the small, repeated events of a single ordinary day and finding real philosophical weight inside them. Nemerov's own service as a pilot in the Second World War, first with the Royal Canadian Air Force and then the United States Army Air Forces, stands behind the poems that address combat and memory with the same formal control he brings to lighter subjects. The volume draws on three decades of work, from his first collection, The Image and the Law, published in 1947, through the books of the 1970s, so a reader can watch the same formal habits mature across an entire career. Across the whole collection Nemerov moves easily between comic wordplay and metaphysical seriousness, often inside the same poem, using close attention to form as a way of thinking clearly rather than a barrier to it.
Reading the book means encountering formal, often witty poems that reward a reader for slowing down to notice how tightly each one is built, closer to a puzzle solved elegantly than to a confession set loose on the page. It suits a reader who enjoys traditional craft used in service of real intellectual play, wit and gravity held together rather than kept apart.
Historical Context & Significance
Collected Poems won both the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the 1978 National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize followed in 1981, a run of recognition matched by very few American poetry books.
Nemerov's sister was the photographer Diane Arbus, and his own path ran through Harvard and wartime service as a pilot before decades of teaching, chiefly at Washington University in St. Louis from 1969 until his death. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress twice, in 1963 and 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990, and later received the National Medal of Arts, and Collected Poems remains the fullest single record of the formalist, wit driven style that made him one of the most honored American poets of his generation.