The Phoenix
The Phoenix
Howard Nemerov 1950
“The Phoenix” concludes Howard Nemerov’s second collection of poetry, Guide to the Ruins. Its plainspoken and flat tone, its short lines, and its subject matter of death and rebirth perfectly suit an end poem. It is not only the final poem in this book; Nemerov felt so strongly about the poem’s tone of finality that he also used it to close his popular 1960 collection New and Selected Poems. “The Phoenix” is sparse, ominous, and frightening, calling forth a dead world of mythological beasts and powers of which humans no longer are able to conceive. Ironically, for a poem that conjures up such a sense of foreboding and finality, the poem is one of the few in the book that does not end with a period—it just fades away, letting its final utterance (the word “Word”) resonate in the reader’s mind.
Author Biography
Born in 1920 in New York City, Howard Nemerov lived his early life in the city, and attended the exclusive Fieldston School—where he was a fine student and an excellent athlete—before matriculating at Harvard. After graduating from Harvard in 1941, Nemerov enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force, then in the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force in England. He was discharged in 1945. Immediately after the war, Nemerov and his English wife lived in New York City, where Nemerov wrote The Image and the Law, his first collection of poems, but they
soon found themselves in need of money and Nemerov took a job teaching English at Hamilton College in upstate New York. In 1948, Nemerov left Hamilton and began teaching at Bennington College in Vermont, where he stayed until 1966, at which point he moved to Brandeis University near Boston. In 1969, Nemerov began teaching at Washington University in St. Louis, and made St. Louis his home for much of the rest of his life.
By 1948, Nemerov had begun writing in earnest. After The Image and the Law in 1947, he published a novel, The Melodramatists, in 1949, and then Guide to the Ruins, the collection in which “The Phoenix” appears, in 1950. Over the next decades, Nemerov continued to teach, to write poetry, fiction, and criticism, and to win the respect of his peers. He has won numerous prizes, grants, and fellowships, most notably the Consultancy in Poetry at the Library of Congress in 1963-1964, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968-69, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1970, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1976, and the Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov in 1978. In 1988, he was named Poet Laureate of the United States. Nemerov died in 1991. His papers are housed at Washington University.
Poem Text
The Phoenix comes of flame and dust
He bundles up his sire in myrrh
A solar and unholy lust
Makes a cradle of his bier
In the City of the Sun 5
He dies and rises all divine
There is never more than one
Genuine
By incest, murder, suicide
Survives the sacred purple bird 10
Himself his father, son and bride
And his own Word
Poem Summary
Stanza 1
In the first stanza of the poem, the narrator introduces the topic of the phoenix. The phoenix is a mythical bird, originally appearing in Egyptian mythology but taken from that tradition by the Greeks and then the Romans. The bird, as described in the first stanza, “comes of flame and dust.” According to the myth, the phoenix is born out of the funeral pyre of its father, and in this stanza Nemerov’s narrator notes that it “bundles up his sire in myrrh” and “makes a cradle of his bier,” or resting place.
Stanza 2
The second stanza continues the description of the phoenix, and places the phoenix in a metaphysical context. The bird rises “all divine” “in the City of the Sun.” The reader does not know what this means—what and where is the City of the Sun? What does it mean, specifically, that the bird is “divine?” He is also “genuine,” a word that has come to be attached almost exclusively to commercial products. What, the reader asks, does it mean that the bird is “genuine?” Is the poet somehow being ironic?
Stanza 3
The final stanza portrays the phoenix as an entirely self-sufficient being. He is his own primary cause—“himself his father, son and bride”—and the continuance of his race is ensured through means that humans consider abhorrent—“incest, murder, suicide.” At the end of the poem, the narrator compares the phoenix to God Himself, for like God, the phoenix is self-sufficient. The doctrine of the Trinity holds that God the Father and God the Son are of one substance, and many theologians argue that the Holy Spirit—the third constituent of the Trinity—is in fact the Word: as the Gospel of John says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Although many commentators have remarked on the similarity between the myth of the phoenix and the story of God and Jesus, here Nemerov brings the idea of the Word into this equation—and, by omitting the period at the end of the stanza, he also suggests the illimitable, atemporal nature of God.
Themes
Myth
“The Phoenix” is based largely on the Egyptian myth of the phoenix. In that myth, the phoenix is a bird that lives for hundreds of years, only to sacrifice itself in fire at the end of its lifespan. From that fire, a new phoenix is born. Only one phoenix can exist on earth at a time. The phoenix has traditionally represented rebirth, because it self-propogates. The myth of the phoenix also manifests humans’ ongoing fascination with fire—like another mythological beast, the salamander, the phoenix is actually comfortable in fire.
In addition, Nemerov emphasizes the self-sufficiency of the bird—it does not need a mate in order to reproduce. In this, the bird is like God, who created his own son out of his own substance. Nemerov emphasizes this aspect of the bird’s life cycle in his line, “Himself his father, son and bride.” He also notes that the bird “bundles up his sire in myrrh,” and myrrh, a type of incense popular in the Middle East in ancient times, is often associated with the story of Jesus’ nativity. In this, Nemerov melds the Christian myths of the Trinity and immaculate conception with the Egyptian and Classical myth of the phoenix.
Cruelty/Violence
In “The Phoenix,” Howard Nemerov emphasizes the cruel and violent nature of ancient myths. The phoenix has always represented a frightening aspect of nature, born out of fire and dying in self-generated fire. But Nemerov focuses on the more primal themes of the phoenix myth: the violence of the bird’s birth and death and the autosexuality of its regeneration. Using such language as “unholy lust,” “incest, murder, suicide,” and “cradle of his bier,” the poet underscores how the terms of human morality do not apply to the phoenix.
Topics for Further Study
- What other literary or artistic works make use of the image of the phoenix? Research the history of this mythological bird. What has it symbolized over history? How has it been used?
- Egyptian culture first used the image of the phoenix. How did the phoenix function in Egyptian mythology? What are other elements of Egyptian mythology? Research the pantheon of Egyptian gods and on the creation myths of Egypt.
- Howard Nemerov takes the form, line, and rhyme scheme of this poem partially from the well-known American poet Emily Dickinson. Who was Emily Dickinson? What did she write about? What elements of her poetry are discernible in Nemerov’s own poetry? You will have to read more of Nemerov’s poetry to answer this question.
Style
“The Phoenix” is written in three stanzas in a fairly regular rhythmic pattern. Each stanza contains four lines; the first and third lines and the second and fourth lines rhyme. Moreover, each line is a self-contained entity. Although the poem has no punctuation, most of the lines are grammatically complete sentences and could end with a period: “The Phoenix comes of flame and dust,” for example, or “There is never more than one.” Unlike the free-verse forms that dominated American poetry in the 1940s and 1950s, the regular lines in this poem do not spill over, grammatically or conceptually, to the next line. Instead, the lines each make a complete statement and express a complete idea.
Nemerov uses the rhythm of each line, as well as the structure of the stanzas, to establish the meaning of the poem. The lines are based on iambic tetrameter—each line containing four iambs, or poetic “feet,” that consist of one unstressed and one stressed syllable. Iambic pentameter (five iambs per line) has traditionally been the preferred line in
Compare & Contrast
- 1950: U.S. President Harry S Truman is embroiled in the Korean War. This conflict, sparked when Communist-led North Korean troops invaded South Korea, was never an “official” war, only a “police action.” An armistice was signed by the belligerents in 1953.
2000: The armistice between North and South Korea is still in effect, but North Korea, led by the dictator Kim Jong Il, continues to behave erratically and unpredictably. Although a famine has gripped the nation for years, the North Korean government continues to spend a great deal of its money on armaments. In addition, the country is the only Stalinist-style totalitarian state left on the planet today. American officials fear Kim’s unpredictability and suspect that he is attempting to acquire nuclear weapons.
- 1950: Spurred by the massive industrial production needed at the end of World War II, the American economy is booming. Returning soldiers share in this prosperity, and as a result of government programs and a healthy private sector, more families are able to own homes, own cars, and go to college than ever before.
2000: The American economy is entering its tenth consecutive year of rapid growth, and largely as a result of the burgeoning computer industry (a field in which the U.S. leads the world), prosperity seems endless.
- 1950: Joseph Stalin, the Soviet premier, rules his country with an iron fist and challenges the U.S. for world cultural and military supremacy. After his death, his successor, Nikita Kruschev, will let the world know of the extent of Stalin’s brutality.
2000: Russian leader Boris Yeltsin retires, and his hand-picked successor Vladimir Putin takes over. Russia’s transition from a state-run communist economy to a “free-market” capitalist economy has been difficult, and the Russian people have suffered great economic hardships. At the same time, a small group of people have enriched themselves by purchasing state-owned properties at bargain prices. The U.S. fears for Russia’s stability.
English for long poems, verse dramas, and epics— Renaissance sonnets, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, and of course most of Shakespeare’s drama is in iambic pentameter. Iambic tetrameter, by contrast, has been a popular line in short lyric poetry for centuries. Alternating rhymed lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter (three feet) create a sing-song effect— Emily Dickinson and Wordsworth both wrote in this form, and many popular songs (think “The Yellow Rose of Texas”) use the form.
Stanzas exclusively of iambic tetrameter, however, give poems a slow, contemplative feeling. Iambic pentameter is approximately the length of most English sentences, and thus iambic pentameter sounds like “real” speech. Iambic tetrameter, though, is slower and shorter than “real” speech. It makes the poem sound careful, precise. With the subject matter here, it also makes the poem sound ominous and foreboding. The rhymes (in an ABAB CDCD EFEF pattern) are not emphasized; some, such as “myrrh” and “bier,” are less direct rhymes than they are “slant,” or almost, rhymes. However, the rhymes work to tighten the stanzas, to link the lines together, and in this they counteract the isolating, slowing rhythm of the iambic tetrameter.
Historical Context
In 1950, poetry was a major issue in the public arena. Ezra Pound, one of the most famous English-language poets in the world, was confined to a Washington, D.C. mental hospital, having been found mentally unfit to stand trial on treason charges. During World War II, Pound had made broadcasts on Italian state radio, and many people felt that this was a treasonous act. (Pound argued that the content of his broadcasts was never determined by the Fascist authorities.) Disgraced, depressed, and shamed, Pound seemed to have departed the public eye, perhaps for good.
But that year, Pound published the latest installment of his long poem, The Cantos. This book, called The Pisan Cantos, because much of it had been written while Pound was incarcerated in an Army detention camp in Pisa, Italy, won the first Bollingen Prize for Poetry, an award sponsored by the Library of Congress. Immediately a furor was sparked. How could Pound be given an award for a book of poetry that, on its first page, mourns Mussolini? How could a traitor be given an award by the same government that had so recently wanted to execute him?
The controversy soon stopped focusing on Pound and became a debate about the proper way to look at poetry, or art in general, and about what the relationship of art and politics should be. The Bollingen judges defended their decision, saying that the aesthetic value of the book was their only criteria. Others, such as the poet and critic Robert Hillyer, shot back that it was impossible for vile political sentiments not to detract from a book’s aesthetic value. Hillyer, writing in the Saturday Review of Literature, argues that a new poetic orthodoxy, epitomized by T.S. Eliot, wanted to make poetry hermetic, closed, and to take it out of public life by drowning it in obscurity. Hillyer’s “common-sense” approach to poetry came under fire by both leftists and right-wingers, who felt that art must be given leeway to examine and express all political opinions.
In the midst of this controversy Nemerov began his career as a poet. Nemerov’s early reviewers notes how his work demonstrates the influence of Eliot and, to a lesser extent, of Pound, but at this time it would have been hard to find a poet who was not influenced by these poets. Nemerov was as much influenced by Allen Tate or W.H. Auden as he was by Eliot. Nemerov’s poetry, seen in retrospect, was actually rejecting the modernist models set forth by Pound and Eliot and the school of criticism (known as the New Criticism) that argued for the superiority of modernism. Instead, Nemerov looked to the past for his inspirations. Using rhyme (which was almost unknown among the modernists) and regular stanza form, Nemerov rebels against the orthodoxy of the avant-garde.
The Pound-Eliot orthodoxy ruled the American poetry scene for decades, largely because the most influential cultural critics and literature professors had grown up in the era when Pound and Eliot were revolutionizing the literary world. Nemerov, who has never gained the respect that other, more modernist-influenced poets have enjoyed, combined many of the innovations of modernism with a look back to traditional forms of verse. In this, he prefigures many poets of today, such as John Ashbery, Charles Wright, and W.S. Merwin.
Critical Overview
Although he had a great deal of success and became a very prominent poet, Howard Nemerov never has been a great favorite of academics, and as a result today he is not much read. Part of the problem is that Nemerov bucked trends: at a time (the 1940s and 1950s) when T.S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s brand of literary modernism and experimentation dominated the world of English poetry, Nemerov looked back to traditional forms and regular rhythms. Nemerov did not reject modernism in the way that other poets—Peter Viereck, for instance, or Philip Larkin—did. However, neither did Nemerov fully embrace modernism’s allusiveness, difficulty, and radical experimentation.
“The Phoenix” appeared in Nemerov’s second collection of verse, Guide to the Ruins. Critics have responded to Nemerov’s poetry with appreciation but rarely with eagerness or enthusiasm. The prominent reviewer Vivienne Koch, writing on Guide to the Ruins in the Sewanee Review, remarked on Nemerov’s extensive poetic ambitions and said that he “is diligent, and explores with considerable ingenuity the possibilities of a great many traditional forms.” “I should guess that Mr. Nemerov will eventually prove a worthy contender for high honors among the poets of his generation,” Koch added. But she is not entirely positive about his book: “he has not entirely mastered his influences,” she feels. But ultimately, she sees Nemerov as a talented, if limited, poet. “While I do not think,” she concludes, “we can expect any enlargement of the capacity for sensuous appreciation … his sincerity and his sharp intellectual control will, no doubt, reap their proper increments.”
I.L. Salomon, writing for the Saturday Review of Literature, is even less positive about Nemerov, and echoes, in harsher terms, some of Koch’s criticisms. Nemerov “suffers from poetic schizophrenia,” he says, because Nemerov imitates not the best aspects but the worst that his “masters ([T.S.] Eliot, [W.H.] Auden, [Allen] Tate) have imposed on a generation of poets.” Salomon criticizes Nemerov
“It is a disturbing story, really, rooted in the violence and foreignness of the ancient world. Like the ancient gods, the phoenix “comes of flame and dust” and is both born out of and consumed in fire.”
for a lack of discipline: “too many [poems] lack the discipline of the writer’s art. Good pieces are marred by a slovenly intrusion of slang and awkward phrase, and fail, since Mr. Nemerov’s ear dares not be true to an authentic impulse. He slights accent and rhythm for the sake of being fashionable.” Nemerov’s “schizophrenia,” according to Salomon, derives from the fact that he “must be modern and his modernity consists also of a studied carelessness of expression … it is incredible that a skillful poet would knowingly obtrude such haphazard writing on the public. In the name of modernity, it is done by design.”
Other critics share Salomon’s and Koch’s ambivalent attitude about Guide to the Ruins. The Hartford Courant’s Morse Allen remarks that “Mr. Nemerov in his disorder has produced these poems, and anyone who wishes to share in his disgruntledness should read them.” In the New Haven Register, J.P. Brennan notes that “Nemerov is too often carried away by his subject matter.” The poet and critic David Daiches, writing for the Yale Review, finds “a curious emptiness … generalized imagery which does not appear to be wedded together by a dominating vision … Too many of the poems lack a burning core to mould the pattern and imagery of the whole into a compelling shape.” Will Wharton of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch deplores the poems’ “uniformly querulous and carping tone,” and in the New Leader, Harry Smith admonishes Nemerov for “an academic mastery of the superficial techniques of modernism does not insure good or interesting poetry.”
“The Phoenix” itself has not received a great deal of attention. However, one critic, Julia Bartholomay, writing in her 1972 study of Nemerov entitled The Shield of Perseus, argues that the poem is about “the idea that words, besides being denotative and connotative, are also reflexive, being about themselves.” She compares the poem to Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle” and concludes that “the two visions of the universe [Nemerov’s and Shakespeare’s] are able to correspond, despite the differences in the poets’ lenses, because of the bifocal nature of imagination.”
Criticism
Greg Barnhisel
Greg Barnhisel holds a Ph.D. in American literature. In this essay, he discusses how Nemerov frames his depiction of the phoenix so as to emphasize the transcultural nature of the myth.
Originating in the mythology of ancient Egypt, the figure of the phoenix was adopted by the Greeks and the Romans, and as a consequence became a part of the Western cultural tradition. In his short, simple poem about “The Phoenix,” Howard Nemerov retells the story of the phoenix, but in his retelling he emphasizes the paradoxical nature of the story. Although this story has persisted for millenia, Nemerov suggests, and although the story has been transmogrified into other, similar stories (especially the Christ story), it is in fact a terrifying story, profoundly other to our tradition and to the values that our culture holds. Nemerov even uses the form of his poem—its rhythm, construction, and rhyme—to allude to one of his predecessor poets who, like the figure of the phoenix, brought forth the strangeness and foreignness at the roots of our beliefs.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the mythical phoenix was a bird, as large as an eagle, with a brilliant gold plumage and a beautiful cry. Only one phoenix existed on earth at any one time, and the bird had a tremendously long lifespan of no less than five hundred years. When its death came near, the bird built a bier, or a funeral pyre, of aromatic branches, spices, and other precious combustibles. It then threw itself on the fire and was consumed. From the ashes a new phoenix arose, which would embalm its father/predecessor in myrrh and bring the ashes to Egypt’s ‘Heliopolis,’ or the City of the Sun, where the ashes would be placed on the altar of the sun. (The bird, not coincidentally, was associated with sun worship.) The Encyclopedia Britannica notes, as well, that “a variant of the story made the dying bird fly to Heliopolis
What Do I Read Next?
- In the first century A.D., the great Roman poet Ovid compiled an anthology of retellings of myths that he entitled The Metamorphoses. This book contains renditions of almost every famous myth known to the classical world, and does include, albeit in passing, a mention of the phoenix myth. Even though the book does not feature the phoenix prominently, it eminently merits reading.
- Nemerov discusses his own poetic practice and the ideas behind it in Figures of Thought: Speculations on the Meaning of Poetry and Other Essays. In this collection, Nemerov discusses, in his characteristically prickly prose, the philosophical and conceptual bases of his poetry. Particularly interesting in this anthology is the domination of the figure of Wallace Stevens, a poet who, by the 1970s, had displaced Eliot and Pound as the most influential American poet of the twentieth century.
- Nemerov won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1977 Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov. The book brought together all of the major works of a poet who had, by that time, been practicing for thirty years, and forced many readers to confront this difficult-to-pigeonhole writer as a major force in postwar American poetry.
- Nemerov is at times associated with a group of earlier poets known as the Objectivist school. Although he cannot be securely categorized as an Objectivist, he does share many of their concerns—most specifically, a belief that poetry must be grounded in the objective material reality of the real world and a concern with the complications inherent in sensory perception of the world. Other poets who are often called Objectivist include William Carlos Williams (a good collection of his is the Selected Poems), George Oppen, and Louis Zukofsky.
and immolate itself in the altar fire, from which the young phoenix then arose.”
As well as being associated with sun worship (a cult that was very powerful in ancient Egypt as well as in Greece, where it was associated with the god Apollo), the phoenix was associated with immortality. Romans and the Roman state religion during the Imperial period compared the bird, arising from the ashes, to the myth of Rome’s founding by Aeneas, who fled the ruin of Troy. The phoenix’s immortality also appealed to Roman mythmakers, and consequently the phoenix appeared on Roman coins.
Nemerov’s poem recounts these traditional attributes of the phoenix almost verbatim. The bird “comes of flame and dust,” being born in a fire. “He bundles up his sire [i.e., father] in myrrh,” the narrator continues. “In the City of the Sun” the bird “dies and rises all divine.” The bird has no other parentage than himself: “himself his father, son and bride.” In Nemerov’s version, the bird is purple, not gold, however; the poet perhaps does this to emphasize both the phoenix’s regalness (purple is the traditional color of royalty) and bring it closer to Christian color symbolism, in which purple is one of the five colors prescribed by the early church, used especially during Lent, Advent, and at funerals.
Because of its connotations of immortality and its presence in late Roman culture, the phoenix came into the Christian iconological tradition. Like Christ, the phoenix is reborn from an apparently ignominious and irretrievable death. Also like Christ, the phoenix partakes of the mystery of the Trinity, for he is both the same as and different from his Father. Where the Trinitarian doctrine holds that Christ and God (and the Holy Spirit) are of one substance and are separate, the phoenix both is and is not constituted of his father—he is born from his father’s ashes but is somehow separate from them. The fact that the phoenix’s birth is accompanied by myrrh, a fragrant tree resin used by ancient Middle Easterners to make perfume, also connects it with the Christ narrative: at the Nativity, the Magi brought the infant Jesus gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
Nemerov, by combining language that alludes to the Christian tradition with the details of the story that are most violent and pagan, underscores to the reader the strangeness of the phoenix myth. It is a disturbing story, really, rooted in the violence and foreignness of the ancient world. Like the ancient gods, the phoenix “comes of flame and dust” and is both born out of and consumed in fire. The worship of the sun and the reverence of fire permeate the myth, and are entirely other to the monotheistic mind. The bird, the third line of the poem tells us, is motivated by “a solar and unholy lust.” This line could not be a more explicit rejection of the Christian tradition, evoking sun worship and the “unholy.” Moreover, in the final stanza the frightening actions of the phoenix—“incest, murder, suicide”—are noted as the very means by which the bird survives.
But as we have seen, the bird just as aptly represents many facets of the Christian narrative, and the language Nemerov chooses echoes the simple, Anglo-Saxon-derived vocabulary of the King James Bible. Such words as “cradle,” “myrrh,” “he dies and rises,” “himself his father, son, and bride,” and the mysterious mention of the “Word,” all point to the story of Jesus as different from and consubstantial with the Father. But, the poet asks us to consider, how can we reconcile these profoundly different worldviews? The original phoenix myth centered on sun worship, immortality, and the power of fire, whereas Christianity emphasizes the worship of a single omnipotent God, who grants immortality. As we look at the poem more closely, the strangeness and residual paganism of Christianity comes clear. If the Phoenix “comes of flame and dust,” does not God do so, as well, when he appears in the form of a burning bush to Moses in the desert? The linking of cradle and bier in the final line of the first stanza suggest the teleological nature of the Christ story—he really is born solely to die in order to bear sins away. The Trinitarian resonances of the phoenix story are clear, as well.
Subtly, then, Nemerov wishes to draw out the pagan roots of Christianity by telling this profoundly disconcerting story and sing the kind of language and images that readers familiar with the Christian tradition cannot help but catch. In this, Nemerov’s poem has some important similarities with the work of another poet who delved into the strangeness at the heart of Christianity. The nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson wrote hermetic, off-kilter, and immensely deep and resonant poems that were suffused with the language of the King James Bible. Her verse explored questions of death, of holiness, and of humans’ relationship to the divine, but did so obliquely and quietly.
Unlike a religious poet such as Gerard Manley Hopkins who exhorted, pled, and extensively questioned in his work, Dickinson pared down her religious thought, loading up small words with extraordinary amounts of meaning in much the way that Nemerov does here. Nemerov takes Dickinson’s emblematic line—the iambic tetrad—and uses it to explore the same questions that preoccupy Dickinson. He even goes so far as to imitate one of her most typical stanzaic constructions: a four-line rhymed stanza in which the final line is significantly shorter than the previous three (which have, generally, either been alternating iambic triads and tetrads or all iambic tetrads). These stanzas drift off disturbingly, for the rest of the lines give us a sense of rhythm that is betrayed in the final line, and Nemerov uses his final lines for precisely the same effect—the final words hang in space. Much as Dickinson does when she uses the language of “old-fashioned religion” to talk about the strangeness of life and the omnipresence of death, Nemerov uses Biblical language and structural allusions to Emily Dickinson to evoke the links and disjunctures between Christianity and the pagan tradition that preceded it.
Source: Greg Barnhisel, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.
Jeannine Johnson
In the following essay, Jeannine Johnson outlines Nemerov’s unique theories about poetry and examines his rather routine treatment of the phoenix as a general symbol of renewal.
Howard Nemerov was a much celebrated poet, winning the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his 1978 Collected Poems and receiving the Bollingen Prize, awarded by Yale University, in 1981. He also served, from 1988 to 1990, as the third poet laureate of the United States. Nemerov has been praised by some critics for his commitment to aesthetic perfection and for his insights into the ways that poetry links observation (or “seeing”) and knowledge (or “saying”). However, since his first volume of verse, he has also been dismissed by others as unoriginal, unspontaneous, and unfeeling, an example of the worst type of the so-called “academic” poet.
Critical reaction to Guide to the Ruins (his second verse collection and the text in which “The
Phoenix” first appeared) is indicative of the controversy that followed Nemerov throughout his career. Vivienne Koch, in her review “The Necessary Angels,” applauded Nemerov’s “ingenuity” and “sharp intellectual control.” I. L. Salomon, on the other hand, was less generous in “Corruption and Metaphysics,” calling Nemerov “A university wit [who has] stifle[d] his considerable gifts by exploiting not the excellence but the defects his masters (Eliot, Auden, Tate) have imposed on a generation of poets.”
Whatever professional readers might have believed, for Nemerov, thinking and feeling were not so easily distinguished, and in poetry, at least, they were not independent operations. He opens his essay “Poetry and Meaning” with a definition of poetry: “What I have to say to you is very simple; so simple that I find it hard to say. It is that poetry is getting something right in language, that this idea of rightness in language is in the first place a feeling, which does not in the least prevent it from existing.” Nemerov implies that poetry reveals fundamental truths, and he argues that we intuit poetry’s accuracy about these truths rather than consciously recognize them.
Nemerov was himself more successful in his mature poems than in his earlier ones at getting something right in language. Most, though by no means all, critics agree that Nemerov’s skills as a poet improved markedly over the first two decades of his career. Part of his improvement came as he began to explore an ever-increasing range of subjects, forms, and emotions. However, even though he was more than what the title “academic poet” would suggest, Nemerov was at his best when he remained true to his philosophical roots, allowing sensation to arrive through intellectual inquiry. For instance, in “The Measure of Poetry,” a prose poem from 1975, Nemerov compares poetry to an ocean wave and confides that “It is the power, not the material, which is transmitted.”
“Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry” stands as an even more compelling reflection on the nature of poetry. In this poem, published in 1980, Nemerov likens sparrows to snowflakes and snowflakes to poems, and he identifies the boundary between prose and verse as follows: “There came a moment that you couldn’t tell. / And then they clearly flew instead of fell” (Sentences). Although Nemerov wrote novels as well as poetry, he still found it difficult to name the difference between the literary genres. Instead, he offers through his metaphor the idea that poetic language
“Nemerov’s delicate use of rhyme anchors the elusive concept which he tries to articulate, and the rhyme also provides an example of the way in which poetry does not tumble forth passively like prose, but instead is arranged more actively and deliberately.”
“flies” while prose “falls,” and declines to elaborate further. Nemerov’s delicate use of rhyme anchors the elusive concept which he tries to articulate, and the rhyme also provides an example of the way in which poetry does not tumble forth passively like prose, but instead is arranged more actively and deliberately.
Some of the rhymes in “The Phoenix”—such as “myrrh” / “bier”—are similarly elegant and provocative; but some—like “Sun” / “one” and “bird” / “Word”—are more remarkable for their predictability. Perhaps this is appropriate, in so far as the predictable rhymes may parallel the regular cycle of the life and death of the phoenix. This legendary creature and its deeds are detailed in a particularly useful account composed by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. In his Histories, written in the fifth-century B.C., Herodotus provides documentation of a “sacred bird … the phoenix; I have not seen a phoenix myself, except in paintings, for it is very rare and visits the country (so they say at Heliopolis) only at intervals of 500 years, on the occasion of the parent-bird. To judge by the paintings, its plumage is partly golden, partly red, and its shape and size is exactly like an eagle. There is a story about the phoenix which I do not find credible; it brings its parent in a lump of myrrh all the way from Arabia and buries the body in the temple of the sun. To perform this feat, the bird first shapes some myrrh into a sort of egg as big as it finds, by testing, that it can carry; then it hollows the lump out, puts its father inside and smears some more myrrh over the hole. The egg-shaped lump is then just of the same weight as it was originally. Finally it is carried by the bird to the temple of the Sun in Egypt. Such, at least, is the story.”
As he often does, Herodotus honors the stories of his ancestors and does his best simply to relay information passed on to him from previous sources. However, he cannot resist commenting on the story’s credibility, and, though he refuses to say that the bird is an imaginary being, he nevertheless manages to reveal his doubts as to the reported activities of the phoenix. Of course, what is most important for poets such as Nemerov is not whether the bird ever existed but what it symbolizes. For thousands of years, authors have written about this mythical bird of Arabia that represents self-sacrifice, destruction, and renewal. The phoenix consumes itself in flames, and then rises from its own ashes. As Nemerov puts it, the bird “Makes a cradle of his bier,” or creates from the place on which his coffin lies (his “bier) a site for his birth (his “cradle”). When he has come to life, the poet tells us, echoing Herodotus, that the phoenix “bundles up his sire in myrrh.” The bird anoints its father with this fragrance and carries him to the “City of the Sun,” or Heliopolis.
Nemerov’s treatment of this old myth is not terribly original, but, in context, it is purposeful. “The Phoenix” is the last poem in the collection Guide to the Ruins, published in 1950. The volume opens with the title poem in which Nemerov introduces the idea of reconstructing myths which have been “broken” and “dishonored” by time and disuse. In this poem he suggests that in order to make our way through the present, we should revisit the past. However, we can never return to a previous time, and what comes to us as history is always incomplete, corroded, and even corrupted. Nemerov continues through other poems to investigate a variety of themes, but his interest lies primarily in ancient stories and legendary figures, and the issue of decay recurs, especially in so far as it is brought about by conflict and war.
The backdrop of war is important, for when Nemerov arrives at the end of his book, we are thereby prepared for the renewal that the phoenix’s self-sacrifice makes possible. The “solar and unholy lust” refers to the bird’s encounter with the sun: in most versions of the phoenix myth, it kills itself by flying too close to this solar orb, immolating itself in the heat and flames. This deed is “unholy” because it involves self-injury. But it is also necessary, and from this act the phoenix “dies and rises all divine.” Nemerov adds that “There is never more than one / Genuine,” which is to say that the new bird is only born when its parent dies. The bird is “Himself his father,” confirming a fundamental connection between disintegration and regeneration: for it is only when one phoenix dies that another can live. The promise of rebirth makes death less fearsome, and, though Nemerov does not emphasize this, the fact that the phoenix is reborn renders it a symbol of immortality.
Though the traditional colors of the phoenix are red and gold, Nemerov refers to the bird’s plumage as “purple.” This is the color of royalty, and, more importantly, it is the color of sacrifice. Christian imagery seems to resonate in the final stanza when Nemerov speaks of the phoenix as “Himself his father, son and bride / And his own Word.” However, Nemerov, who was Jewish, is likely suggesting a more broad application of these ideas. The phoenix is itself a pre-Christian figure, and the “Word” may signify poetic language in general. Furthermore, the bird “By incest, murder, suicide / Survives.” In other words, there is no single kind of suffering that it represents, and thus the phoenix offers hope for recovery without limits and, by extension, hope for discovery of the sort made possible by poetry.
Source: Jeannine Johnson, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.
Sean K. Robisch
Sean Robisch is an assistant professor of ecological and American literature at Purdue University. In the following essay, he focuses on Nemerov’s use of the mythological in “The Phoenix.”
Every five hundred years, according to the myth, a great bird rises from the ashes of its dead progenitor. Maybe the sire of the bird was its mother or father; maybe the bird gives birth to itself; in some versions of the myth, both are true. It was called semenda in ancient India, bennu in ancient Egypt, and was represented by a great blue heron. Its name means “purple” or “palm leaf” in the Greek, and so it may have been connected with royalty (purple being a rare and difficult dye and therefore worn largely by the wealthy in the West; the palm frond holding a number of significant symbolic values). In some myths its rise and fall is associated with the rising and setting of the sun. But in all of the myths, the ashes are important, because they represent the ruins out of which something new is built. The myth is of resurrection, which means it is simultaneously about death and birth, and so it has remained one of the most famous and powerful stories of the ages. The story of the phoenix so ingrained itself in European consciousness that from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries it appeared in bestiaries; religious leaders declared it to be a real bird.
In Howard Nemerov and Objective Idealism, Donna L. Potts writes, “Language is for Nemerov what language once was for the alchemists—the means for transforming the base elements of this world into gold.” Nemerov’s assumption that language could have magical qualities was partly influenced by the philosophy of objective idealism. Language could be “magical” in the sense that it serves as a mediator between us and the physical world. This means that our imaginations participate in how the world works. Based on this assumption, myths are “real,” and the mythic images of Nemerov’s poems therefore have metaphoric power for him. If in ancient Egypt the bennu was a heron, then the actual bird and the imagined or magical bird—The Phoenix—are both necessary for stories, myths, and religions to exist. This may be one reason why Nemerov so consistently uses words we often associate with holiness and spiritual iconography in “The Phoenix.” Each line carries some reference to the fundamental material of the world in connection to a kind of scriptural belief.
Nemerov frequently turns to myth in his writing, even in his speeches, which are peppered with references to past literatures, quotes in ancient languages, and applications of religion and belief to methods of writing. As an objective idealist, one who believes in the negotiation of imagination and fact, Nemerov in his work often attempts to cope with this negotiation, and his subject matter in Guide to the Ruins—especially ancient myth and war—give him the opportunity. Much of the collection (an early work of the poet’s that comes before, in the view of many critics, his poetry fully matured) is devoted to ancient myths, juxtaposed with the experiences of war in the modern world and the structures of poetry. Such character-based poems as Nicodemus, “Virgin and Martyr,” “Mars,” and “Antigone” give “The Phoenix” a context necessary to our appreciation of its meanings. In fact, the title of the collection implies that the poet is taking us through the remnants of history, whether the ruins of old myths (the last—or first— of which in the book is “The Phoenix”), the ruins of war, or the inscriptions of sonnets on pages. Nemerov is certainly a referential poet, to the extent that some critics have accused him of being derivative.
“If in ancient Egypt the bennu was a heron, then the actual bird and the imagined or magical bird—The Phoenix—are both necessary for stories, myths, and religions to exist.”
The formal rhyme scheme (abab) also gives the poem a kind of age; it reads like a nineteenth-century elegy, an epitaph worn thin on a stone. It is an explanation of the phoenix, a definition of it that retells the myth through the poet’s characterization of the bird, rather than through a story form or an encyclopedic account of what a phoenix is. Nemerov chooses to focus on the character rather than the narrative perhaps because, as in many myths, the character is the narrative. The stories of the phoenix that most remember in the modern era focus primarily on what the creature is, rather than on what it does. The flooding of the Nile, for instance, and the beginning of a season in Egypt, is hardly the resonant myth of the phoenix in the western world. A more general cyclical myth adheres; there is birth and death, the rising and setting of the sun, but we have many other myths that represent such events. The individuality of the phoenix is in the nature (or magical metaphor of nature) of its rise and fall. It appears from its own ashes, and is the icon of fire. This distinguishes it from other resurrection myths (such as Christ from the tomb) by its elements, but, as we will see, the separation of mythologies is seldom complete.
Nemerov has been called “unromantic” in his treatment of nature, and frequently cited as employing “science” in his material. He is acutely romantic in many of his poems—practically an anachronism in his view of science and spirituality, especially as they meet on fairly simple terms in formalist poems. In a poem such as “The Phoenix,” he joins the ranks of the seventeenth-century bestiary writers. It doesn’t get much more romantic and unscientific than to construct a rhyming three-stanza poem to a mythic bird. We might say then, that Nemerov, like most poets, defies easy categorization. He writes about the material that moves him, and lets the philosophy work out itself. The myth is important enough to merit the poem. One thing we may find, however, seeping up through the characterization of the phoenix, is how Nemerov is enamoured with language as the mediator among the poet’s imagination, religion, and objective reality. The final line, where we might start the explication of this poem, capitalizes “Word.”
In the Bible, the word, logos, is represented physically by Christ. Nemerov connects the Christian and Egyptian myths in the poem by using his last two lines to articulate the resurrection of the phoenix in terms of the trinity and the immaculate conception. The mythic bird is the Word, the son, but it is also its own father and mother (because of rising from its ashes). This unity of myth is fore-shadowed in the poem’s second line, in which the preparation for burial of the father is made. Myrrh is an aromatic gum resin from a tree that grows in the Middle East and Africa. It was used in mummification, and was also a gift brought by one of the wise men to Christ’s cradle (the image mentioned at the end of stanza one). Myrrh may have been one of the phoenix’s foods. R. Van Den Broek, in his study The Myth of The Phoenix, explains that the mythic bird subsisted on many aromatics.
The cradle and bier (a funeral pyre) are the birth and death images, but the “solar” nature of the myth is called by Nemerov “unholy lust.” But at the beginning of stanza two, the “City of the Sun” is capitalized, valorized, much like the Augustine “City of God.” This could be a reference to the necessity of polarity, of the binary in belief that to have good one must have evil, and the phoenix, by its cyclical nature, accounts for both. He indicates this again in the final stanza, by casting the story in its darkest terms. The Phoenix lives by committing a sin, and continues through its life toward the moment of committing that sin again. In conjunction with the last lines of the poem, this implies that all myths have some element of the evil in their goodness, and vice-versa.
The “sacred, purple bird” is a Christ figure with which we might not be comfortable, but, in keeping with Nemerov’s philosophy, it is “Genuine”—a myth as the real thing, and is still “divine.” As in much of Nemerov’s work; the simplicity of polarized images often belies itself; it makes us question how simple that split between good and evil, holy and unholy, birth and death, actually is. Perhaps the magic of the phoenix is the way in which it casts doubt on the distinctions we make between how certain subjects are best raised again over the ages in our poems, and demands that we bring our imaginations to the world of objective reality. That way, we choose carefully the stories that most need to be retold, reborn.
Source: Sean K. Robisch, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.
Sources
Bowers, Neal, and Charles L.P. Silet, “An Interview with Howard Nemerov,” Massachusetts Review, Spring, 1981, pp. 43-57.
Brennan, J.P., Review of Guide to the Ruins, New Haven Register, June 19, 1950, sec. 4 p. 8.
Broek, R. Van Den, The Myth of the Phoenix: According to Classical and Early Christian Traditions, E. J. Brill, 1972.
Daiches, David, Review of Guide to the Ruins by Howard Nemerov, Yale Review, Winter, 1951, p. 356.
Duncan, Bowie, ed., The Critical Reception of Howard Nemerov, The Scarecrow Press, 1971.
Herodotus, The Histories, Translated by Aubrey de Selin-court, revised with introductory matter and notes by John Marincola, Penguin, 1996.
Koch, Vivienne, “The Necessary Angels of the Earth,” in The Critical Reception of Howard Nemerov: A Selection of Essays and a Bibliography, edited by Bowie Duncan, Scarecrow Press, 1971.
———, Review of Guide to the Ruins, Sewanee Review, Autumn, 1951, p. 674.
Meinke, Peter, “Twenty Years of Accomplishment” in The Critical Reception of Howard Nemerov, edited by Bowie Duncan, The Scarecrow Press, 1971, pp. 29-39.
Nemerov, Howard, The Collected Poems, University of Chicago Press, 1977.
———, “Poetry and Meaning,” in Figures of Thought: Speculations on the Meaning of Poetry and Other Essays, David R. Godine Publishers, 1978.
———, Sentences, University of Chicago Press, 1980.
———, “The Swaying Form: A Problem in Poetry,” Nicholas Delbanco, editor, Speaking of Writing: Selected Hopwood Lectures, University of Michigan Press, 1990, pp. 163-176.
Potts, Donna L., Howard Nemerov and Objective Idealism: The Influence of Owen Barfield, University of Missouri Press, 1994.
Salomon, I.L., “Corruption and Metaphysics,” Saturday Review of Literature, July 1, 1950, p. 33.
Smith, Harry, Review of Guide to the Ruins, New Leader, Nov. 13, 1950, p. 22.
Warden, Will, Review of Guide to the Ruins, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 18, 1950, E22.
For Further Study
Bartholomay, Julia A., The Shield of Perseus: The Vision and Imagination of Howard Nemerov, University of Florida Press, 1972.
This early study of Nemerov focuses on such issues as the role of the imagination in poetic composition, the place of art in the world, and questions of intellectual and sensory perception.
Mills, William, The Stillness in Moving Things: The World of Howard Nemerov, Memphis State University Press, 1975.
This book, a close reading of many of Nemerov’s poems throughout his career (at least up to 1975), focuses on Nemerov’s philosophical concerns and his attitudes toward artistic perception and the question of what to portray in poetry.
Potts, Donna L., Howard Nemerov and Objective Idealism, University of Missouri Press, 1994.
Potts concentrates on the philosophical issues raised by Nemerov’s poetry, using the epistemologist Owen Barfield (an acknowledged source for Nemerov’s ideas) to read the verse.