SOURCE: Kiehl, James M. “The Poems of Howard Nemerov: Where Loveliness Adorns Intelligible Things.” Salmagundi 22/23 (spring/summer 1973): 234-57.

In the following essay, Kiehl briefly analyzes numerous poems by Nemerov, suggesting that the poems excite the imagination and enhance the reader's understanding of the world.

Despite my abstracting a phrase from “Blue Swallows” and for the moment seeming to return it to a banal notion that poems are merely ornamental, I believe that Nemerov's poems are often great imaginative instruments that lead us far out. They take us to the ground of being to watch the dragonfly become, transformed from brutal night below and ascending to the sun (“The Dragonfly”). They further lead us, as in “The Beekeeper Speaks … And Is Silent,” to listen to the stars beyond the sun. And despite the typical lucidity of Nemerov's poems and despite his usual achievement of splendid images, his poems are...