Howard Nemerov

From Philosopedia

Nemerov, Howard (29 February 1920 – 5 July 1991)

Nemerov, an American author who wrote poetry, fiction, criticism, often with a philosophic viewpoint, received a Pulitzer in 1977 for his Collected Poems.

Asked about humanism, the New York City-born poet who became United States Poet Laureate and whose younger sister was Diane Arbus, responded:

I have not myself had much occasion to use the word humanism or its curricular form humanities. The latter probably began as an administrative convenience for separating what was science from whatever was not, but the tail soon began wagging the dog—as if the sciences were somehow not a human endeavor! —and people accordingly began treating the verbal distinction as a real border, or maybe a better chasm.

Your investigation has as a side-effect the illustration of what happens when people meet the demand to define their terms, the demand is a sign of unease, possibly of disease, a crisis of faith in which what is demanded is demanded precisely because it has become impossible: the result is a splitting into orthodoxies and heresies of just that sectarian sort that has ever been characteristic of religion and its disputes, wranglings, hair-splittings, and burnings at the stake; the sort, maybe, that the term humanism was in the first place designed to evade.

This is a Laodician response on my part, and I have long regarded the trimmers as the nicest people in hell. To be at home in one’s language is to be happy with its splendid inability to stick to one subject or to say only one thing about it. I’ll settle for being comfortably, or what others will call ignobly, vague.

{WAS, 24 March 1989}