The world knows Howard Nemerov as twice the U.S. Poet Laureate, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, a distinguished professor and poet-in-residence at Washington University for twenty-one years—and a bit of an enigma. A stylist impatient with literary pretension; a deep thinker who held up wit and irony as a shield, then forged on. “Romantic, realist, comedian, satirist, relentless and indefatigable brooder upon the most ancient mysteries—Nemerov is not to be classified,” Joyce Carol Oates once warned.

We know that he was the older brother, often disapproving, of the brilliant, deliberately shocking photographer Diane Arbus. That he was married, lifelong, to a woman he fell in love with when he was an Air Force pilot and rescued from World War II. That they had three children, the middle son being the art historian and writer Alexander Nemerov.

But until now, the world knew nothing of his twenty-year love for a woman from Philadelphia named Joan Coale. 

https://commonreader.wustl.edu/letters-from-howard-nemerovs-discreet-love-affair-are-finally-unfolded/