16 pages • 32 minutes read
Howard NemerovThe Goose Fish
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context
In The Salt Garden, Nemerov’s third collection, in which “The Goose Fish” appears, his poetry was more focused on nature than it had been up to that point. This continued in subsequent volumes such as Mirrors and Windows (1958) and The Blue Swallows (1967). Nemerov commented in Poets on Poetry (1966) on this aspect of his work: “During the war and since, I have lived in the country, chiefly in Vermont, and while my relation to the landscape has been contemplative rather than practical, the landscape nevertheless has in large part taken over my poetry” (“Howard Nemerov.” Poetry Foundation). As his remark suggests, he remained an intellectual and philosophical poet, but now he often explored the interaction between human consciousness and the natural world. Nemerov wrote often about birds, such as gulls in “The Salt Garden” and “The Gulls,” swallows (“The Blue Swallows”), crows (“Brainstorm”), sandpipers (“Sandpipers”), and one notable poem about the cry of a loon (“The Loon’s Cry”). He also wrote about sea creatures such as trout (“The Sanctuary”) and lobsters (“Lobsters”), and one poem about dragonflies (“The Pond”). His ironic wit and seriousness of purpose is apparent in many of those and other nature poems, as it is in “The Goose Fish.” It would, however, be hard to find a poem in Nemerov’s oeuvre that resembles that unusual exploration of the dead fish that turns up on the shore, although in “Shells” (from Mirrors and Windows) the speaker muses about the significance of a shell that one might pick up on a shore (rather as the lovers muse about the symbolic meaning of the goose fish).
Historical Context
In the 1950s and 1960s, Nemerov was often regarded by those who did not much care for his work as a rather academic or intellectual poet. However, many of the leading poets of the period were also academic poets. This was a time when, unlike before World War II, many American poets had teaching positions in universities. These included Theodore Roethke, James Dickey, Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley, John Berryman, Richard Wilbur, John Hollander, Donald Justice, and others, although the work of these poets is diverse and the term “academic poet” is a rather general one. Nevertheless, many of these poets were influenced by the illustrious work of an earlier generation, including T.S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. The academic poets often wrote formal, expertly rhymed, reflective, witty poems (like “The Goose Fish”). They might start with a natural scene of an object of some kind and meditate on it, adopting an impersonal voice and moving toward greater clarity of feeling. In the case of Nemerov, he started writing poetry after studying Eliot and Yeats at Harvard, and he is sometimes compared to Robert Frost. Although Nemerov was a respected poet who was celebrated by the poetry establishment (as his many awards show) but he never achieved the renown, reputation, or impact of poets such as Robert Lowell, particularly with his Life Studies (1959) and Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs (1964).
