Time & Perspective Quote by Howard Nemerov

Nemerov is doing that very poet thing: praising a seismic shift while quietly puncturing its self-mythologizing. He grants the modernist “revolution” its headline - Eliot and Pound as the engineers of a new poetic order - then turns the knife on how revolutions age. The line “maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history” doubles as a shrug and a warning: history is the great solvent. What once felt like a total overthrow of the old regime gets absorbed into the wallpaper of craft, reduced to “technical tricks” that can be copied without the original urgency.

The subtext is less anti-modernist than anti-hagiography. Nemerov isn’t denying that Eliot and Pound changed the possibilities of English verse; he’s skeptical of the retrospective romance we attach to innovation. Once a technique becomes teachable, it starts looking like mere technique. Free verse, fragmentation, allusion-as-architecture - these can harden into mannerisms, available to anyone with a syllabus and a little nerve. That’s how revolutions get domesticated: the risk drains out, the gesture remains.

There’s also a poet’s professional anxiety humming underneath. If modernism’s shock tactics can be mistaken for “tricks,” then any period’s signature moves can. Nemerov, writing in a later century’s long shadow of high modernism, is defending something harder to counterfeit than style: the animating pressure behind the style. The real innovation isn’t the device; it’s the necessity that made the device feel inevitable. History, he implies, remembers results, not adrenaline.