SOURCE: Russell, Henry W. “Howard Nemerov and the Poetry of Mysterious Order.” Formalist 3, no. 1 (1992): 53-57.

In the following essay, Russell says that Nemerov embraced the idea of an ordered universe bound by natural law.

Throughout the body of his poetic works Howard Nemerov charted the way out of a world which modernists claim has fallen into fragments and which “post-modernists” chortle has always and only been fragmentary. In his own way Nemerov was as much ahead of his time, yet based in ancient insights, as the new science of chaos that looks at apparently random elements of the world and finds within them a persistent and ineluctable order. Not surprisingly this order looks more than a little like that which Plato, Aristotle, and the Western tradition had always said was there, although they had insufficient science to prove it.

Like so many of these scientists Nemerov is reluctant...