SOURCE: Mills, William. “Because the Mind's Eye Lit the Sun.” In The Stillness in Moving Things, pp. 1-30. Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1975.

In the following essay, Mills dwells on the ways in which Nemerov's poetry reflects the tenets of phenomenology as outlined by Edmund Husserl and William Luijpen.

One element in the poetry of Howard Nemerov that urges his relevance to contemporary audiences is his awareness of the main currents of thought during his own time. He does not write as if he lived in a pre-Cartesian world or as if the Einsteinian world picture had not come along. As poet and thinker he has taken the problems of his day seriously, engaged them, and this engagement is an intrinsic part of his value.

Nowhere is this awareness of the ideas of the times more apparent in Nemerov's work than in the area of epistemology. By “awareness...