[In the following review, DeMott praises Figures of Thought as a collection of erudite essays which touch deeper matters than mere literary criticism.]

“I am neither historian nor philosopher,” says the poet Howard Nemerov in Figures of Thought, a volume of subtly linked literary essays, “and this is not the occasion for a philosophical discourse or one on the history of mind.” Flanks covered, scouts out, whereupon a critic is free to do what he pleases, including history and philosophy. There is, in fact, rather more of both in this book than in most such collections. At the core of the majority of the pieces—the subjects include Dante, Joyce, the nature of modern poetry and the sins of contemporary criticism—lies an assumption about the direction of the modern history of the mind. And it's when the essayist bends intensely to the work of explaining complicated moments in that history—the emergence, for instance, of the poetic mode called Imagism, or of the occupation called English teaching—that he achieves his most admirable effects.

The assumption in question, simply stated, is that, owing to a “very great something that has happened in the world,” human beings are less able to think and feel from the center of things than they once were, with the result that art, language, humanness itself have undergone transformation. Not a hugely original idea, as the author is well aware. (Mr. Nemerov stresses, in particular, his debt to Owen Barfield and Erich Heller.) And I have an objection or two to the way it's advanced in Figures of Thought. The critic says little about why the great change came to pass. (We're told only that what's happened is attributable less to science than to the entire manifold of forces—business, education, revolution, racism, and the rest—that dominates the present age.)

There are a few tonal problems. Shrewd and elegant in verse, Howard Nemerov is sometimes a shade arch as a prose writer. (Too many feathery “O dears,” and “alases,” too many paragraphs beginning with singleword sentences: “So.”)

Taken as a whole, though, these “speculations” are uncommonly stimulating and persuasive. The opening essay, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Skylark,” offers brilliant formulation of the poetic preoccupation, in more or less recent days, with the phenomenal, with things as lived—experience first, meaning second, third or also-ran. “Poetry attempts to catch the first evanescent flickerings of thought across the surface of things. It wants to be as though the things themselves were beginning to speak; they would speak somewhat darkly, the light that came from them would be black light at first.” A subsequent series of pieces originating as lectures and entitled “What Was Modern Poetry?” develops the theme that modernism was a mode of coping with the human dream of oneness with “the things themselves.” (Some modernists—i. e., the Imagists—were driven, at their worst, into desperate baby-with-the-bath extremism by these longings, but many succeeded in re-creating the lost world of whole imaginative response.) And a superb essay on “Speaking Silence,” draws together the interpretation of change in humankind and the account of the aims of the poetic enterprise in such a way as to provide a basis for one of the soundest critiques of contemporary literature teaching that I've yet seen in print.

“… It would be true to say, about a vast lot of what goes on in the curriculum of the English department,” Mr. Nemerov writes, “that we had the meaning but missed the experience.” And he then demonstrates—boldly, humorously, affectingly—how a class on George Herbert's “Prayer” might go if conducted as a search for the experience.

More important than any of this, Figures of Thought communicates throughout a vivid sense of the possibility of a richer kind of knowing in all areas than we're in process of settling for, and, as a consequence, never seems purely literary in implication. There is a steady undercurrent of diffidence—hostility to over-reaching. (A rumination on “Poetry and Painting” that could have intensified awareness of the universality of the craving to “speak the thing”—by focusing on, say, Cézanne as interpreted by Merleau-Ponty—instead retreats gracefully from the field.) But the feeling for the richness of imagined experience, for the fullness that myth alone gathers, is wonderfully enlivening, especially as it floods into the splendid appreciations of Yeats, Richard Wilbur and Randall Jarrell—celebrations of poetic recoveries of wholeness—that conclude the book. At its best Figures of Thought isn't just modest and shapely; like the high art it salutes, it brims with the life of things.