The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov
By Howard Nemerov American poet Howard Nemerov was born on Leap Day in 1920 in New York City. His family owned Russeks, the famous and elegant Fifth Avenue department store where ladies shopped for the finest furs. His father loved photography, painting, and philanthropy and encouraged the same in his children. Howard turned to poetry and his sister Diane took up photography. Under her married name, Diane Arbus, she became quite famous in the 1960s for her unsettling portraits of morgues and circus workers. In later years, Nemerov had a falling out with his sister: he found the content of her photographs distasteful, and she felt he was too conservative artistically. Nemerov was raised in a sophisticated city environment that included schooling at the very liberal Society for Ethical Culture’s Fieldston School, which strove to introduce its students to social justice, racial equality, and intellectual freedom. After graduating from Harvard, Nemerov served as a pilot during World War II, first in the Royal Canadian Air Force and later the U.S. Army Air Force. When the war ended, he turned to teaching and published his first collection of poetry, The Image of the Law (1947). Nemerov was a formalist who wrote almost exclusively in fixed forms and meter. He was disdainful of poems that incorporated politics. He said: “I’ve never read a political poem that’s accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.” Poems from Howard Nemerov: | 
