SOURCE: Labrie, Ross. “The Later Poems.” Howard Nemerov, pp. 104-42. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.

In the following essay, Labrie discusses Nemerov's books of poetry from New and Selected Poems to The Western Approaches, emphasizing the ways in which the poet reconciles imagination and reality.

New & Selected Poems, published in 1960, contained fifty-eight poems, of which only fifteen were new. Included among the new poems, however, was a major work—“Runes.” The collection is a transitional one, a culmination of the themes and motifs of the 1950s and a prelude to the more intricate and reflexive poems of the 1960s. Nemerov described “Runes” as both a “summary of many years' partial preoccupation with its subjects and illustrations” and at the same time as the “beginning of something else.”¹

“Runes” was written in an intense two-week period—the way Nemerov likes to write. The memory of its composition has stayed in his...