| Name: |
Howard Nemerov |
| Birth Date: |
|
| Death Date: |
|
| Place of Birth: |
|
| Place of Death: |
|
| Nationality: |
|
| Gender: |
|
| Occupations: |
|
Among important mid-century American poets, Howard Nemerov is perhaps the most disarming. Hardly a disparaging claim has been made against his work that he has not acknowledged or preempted. As he says in "Attentiveness and Obedience" (1966): "The charge typically raised ... has been that my poems are jokes, even bad jokes. I incline to agree, insisting however that they are bad jokes, and even terrible jokes, emerging from the nature of things as well as from my propensity for coming at things a touch subversively and from the blind side, or the dark side, the side everyone concerned with 'values' would just as soon forget." His low-key emotional display, his serious intellect, his habitual irony, his precise, dispassionate language, his tendencies to sententiousness, conventional modern paradox, and convoluted syntax, as well as his dark joking, are all subjects of his own commentary in prose, poetry, and interview. But that is often the technique of the humanist intellectual: to affirm values (perhaps sententiously), to observe and analyze human weaknesses (perhaps equivocally and cynically) and strengths (by means of paradox, and thus often ironically), and to perform some positive, if ultimately ineffectual, act in the blank face of the universe.
This is a free page. This page contains 151 words. This
biography contains 6,908 words (approx. 23 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Howard (Stanley) Nemerov Access Pass.
