SOURCE: Spiegelman, Willard. “Alphabetizing the Void: Poetic Diction and Poetic Classicism.” Salmagundi 42 (summer/fall 1978): 132-45.

In the following essay, Spiegelman compares the poetry of Nemerov, A. R. Ammons, and Allen Tate, asserting that all three poets have drawn on the classical past and have become masters of linguistic form.

Lifting mirages to break horizons, dreaming Idolatries to alphabet the void, Sending these postcards to the self at home: Sunlight on pouring water; wish I were here. 

Thus Howard Nemerov as Moses in “The View from Pisgah,” or the contemporary poet as Hebrew sage, tantalized by a vision of home but forbidden the promised land where word and object, thought and style, are automatically and felicitously wed. Turning from Pisgah to review retrospectively the terrain of modern poetry, we can see how struggles with language define the poetic task. And when three such disparate talents as Nemerov, A. R...