An Inside View

...Rather, we have to deduce from the body of his work the guidelines of his thinking, to generalize from his practice his principles of criticism...

...But when 1 consider what they have accomplished, and more, what those accomplishments have cost, then I think that we who are haunted by self-awareness have our achievements too...

...Roethke, Shapiro, Winters, Dylan Thomas, and Perse, and possibly Auden...

...devotion to the art of poetry is, after all, not quite the same as devotion to poetry...

...the novelists Nabokov, Sillitoe and Mann...

...I have no intention of arguing the merits of one or the other way of proceeding to the examination and evaluation of a work of literature...

...On the debit side we find the poets MacLeish, Viereck, Spender, Jarrell...

...Nemerov is neither a literary historian nor an esthetician nor a systematizer, and he belongs to no school of literary criticism...

...he is concerned with the nuances of tones and textures...

...I have said that Nemerov is concerned with the act of making...

...above all, he is most attentive to the act of making...

...As a literary historian, I found the way in which he goes about his work fascinating since it differs so much from mine...

...The bulk of the book, being made up in the main of reviews of the work of recent writers, is contemporary in orientation, but there are also longer essays on classic writers: Dante, Shakespeare, Byron, Longfellow, and Mann...

...his interest in the critical market is neither in the quick buck of speculative promotions nor in safe institutional growth stock, but in the pleasure of the exercise of his own independent taste and judgment...

...One way of doing this is to enter the names of the writers he considers in the appropriate credit and debit columns of his critical ledger...

...the novelists Cozzens, Warren, Herbert Gold, and possibly Faulkner...

...On the credit side of the ledger we find the poets Stevens, Ransom, Tate, Graves, Whittemore and Kees...

...Wonderfully skilled, knowledgeable and cultivated, Nemerov is a conspicuous examplar of the man of letters of our time...

...I tend to approach a work of literature from the outside, so to speak, in terms of its category, structure, and social and intellectual ambience...

...The result is an attitude of mind sophisticated and wry, concerned, not with storming the ramparts of earth and heaven, but with finding elegant solutions to problems so difficult technically that only those who know how difficult they really are know how really elegant are the solutions...

...Though he is too polite to say so, I would guess that he finds my way exasperatingly quite beside the point...

...Yet there is lacking a certain dedication, a certain passion...

...To continue, but to vary the financial figure, Nemerov holds a distinctively personal portfolio...

...It is an awareness so conscious that it takes its greatest pleasure and pride in the consciousness of that awareness...

...I bring to bear on it information and attitudes derived from extra-literary sources, from literary history, linguistics, the history of ideas, psychology, anthropology, and the like...

...The 37 pieces in this volume were written between 1948-62 and are arranged, not in the order of composition, but by literary forms: the first and third sections being concerned with general questions of poetry and fiction, the second and fourth with discussions of specific examples of the two forms, and the final group consisting of analyses of the problems of translation...

...I am not trying to be superior...

...There is, therefore, no point in trying to place Nemerov in the correct critical file tagged with the correct critical label...

...devotion to the study of literature is not devotion to literature either...

...And I would point to Nemerov's Poetry and Fiction as an example and measure of our kind of accomplishment...

...The one exception is the essay, "The Dream of Reason," a powerful attack from the point of view of liberal humanism on the kind of genetic engineering advocated by Hermann J. Muller, and, by implication, on the pretensions of certain scientists...

...With one exception, all the pieces are concerned with specific problems of literature and with specific pieces of work...

...and the critics Cowley, Vivas, and Hyman...

...Nemerov, on the other hand, writes from inside the work outward...

...The hallmark of Nemerov's criticism, then, is intense self-awareness, as it is, I believe, of his poetry and fiction as well...

...On the evidence of this paper I had hoped for more essays on larger social questions, but Nemerov sticks to his last...

...and the critics Blackmur and those students of Shakespeare who use the method of image, symbol and myth analysis...

...I would hold," he writes, "that there is, in addition to the emotion dealt with by poetry, an emotion of poetry and alone proper to it, a rhythmic or patterned exaltation which takes up and transforms its complex material of feelings and objects, making them dance in a different and noneditorial world, of which, despite the seriousness and sadness of its themes, the dominating traits are gaiety, energy, and control...

...He writes, in short, as a practicing poet and novelist confronting the same problems of craft which have occupied the poet or novelist he is examining...

...Now, with the collection of his essays, lectures, and reviews in Poetry and Fiction: Essays, it is clear that his is a critical voice deserving of an attentive and appreciative audience...

...I must confess that, though I had known Howard Nemerov's poems and novels and had read them with pleasure, I was not aware of the extent and variety of his literary criticism...

...In other words, I close in on the work by coming up on it along several avenues of approach...

...Unfortunately, such critics have been, and are, rare indeed, and we must do what we can as the bent of our temperaments and training directs us, only hoping that we have enough modesty and sense to know when we fall short and need help...

...It is making of a special kind which moves him and for which he looks, however, and I would define it as poetry which is intensely self-aware of itself as poetry and which glows with a special élan and excitement when it finds its own solutions to its own problems...

...We neither of us—and all the rest of like mind—dares great things, partly because we do not have the temperament, partly because we do not know what great things are in the context of our times, but mostly because we know in advance they will be in vain...

...the ideal literary critic should be able to do both and to do more: to fuse them into a single, yet comprehensive, critical tool...

...I occasionally envy men who are completely unself-conscious, who never look over their shoulders, who move directly from thought to deed, who accomplish things...

...it is constantly seeing itself see itself, constantly sharpening its sight...

...And I would suspect that is why he reacted so strongly against Stanley Edgar Hyman's The Armed Vision, which takes as its thesis the function of literary criticism as "the organized use of non-literary techniques and bodies of knowledge to obtain insights into literature...