Howard (Stanley) Nemerov - Life and career, Poetry, Bibliography

Poet, born in New York City, USA. He studied at Harvard, then taught at several institutions, including Bennington (1948–66) and Washington University, St. Louis (from 1967). He was named consultant in poetry (1963–4) and poet laureate by the Library of Congress (1988), and is known for his literary prose works and blank verse, as in Collected Poems (1977). Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems 1961–91 appeared in 1991.

Howard Nemerov (February 29, 1920 – July 5, 1991) was United States Poet Laureate on two separate occasions: from 1963 to 1964, and from 1988 to 1990. The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize.

Life and career

Born in New York City, his parents were David and Gertrude (Russek) Nemerov.

Nemerov then began teaching, first at Hamilton College and later at Bennington College, Brandeis University, and finally Washington University in St. Louis, where he was Edward Mallinckrodt Distringuished University Professor of English and Distinguished Poet in Residence from 1969 until his death in 1991. Nemerov's numerous collections of poetry include Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991 (University of Chicago Press, 1991); The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize; The Winter Lightning: Selected Poems (1968); they include The Homecoming Game (1957), Federigo: Or the Power of Love (1954), and The Melodramatists (1949).

Nemerov received many awards and honors, among them fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and The Guggenheim Foundation, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the National Medal of the Arts, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and the first Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. He served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1963 and 1964, as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets beginning in 1976, and as poet laureate of the United States from 1988 to 1990. Nemerov died of cancer in 1991 in University City, Missouri.

Poetry

Nemerov's work is formalist.

"A Primer for the Daily Round" is his most frequently anthologized poem, and highly representative of Nemerov's poetic style.

"A Primer for the Daily Round"

Bibliography

Poetry

The Image of the Law (1947) The Salt Garden (1955) Mirrors and Windows (1958) The Winter Lightning: Selected Poems (1968) The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977) Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991 (1991)

Prose

The Melodramatists (1949 Federigo: Or the Power of Love (1954) The Homecoming Game (1957)