[In the following excerpted review of Poetry and Fiction, Howard praises Nemerov's evaluations of other poets.]

An admiring frequenter of Howard Nemerov's verse and of his fiction, I found the big set-pieces of his criticism, an art of opinion as he calls it, as much to my expectations as to my taste: manly, delicate, serious, funny, industrious, graceful. Essays on Longfellow and on Two Gentlemen of Verona show what this mind, at its stretch, can do with professionally “unpromising” material. The piece on “Composition and Fate in the Short Novel”, one of the most illuminating studies of a genre I know, the adscititious essays on Thomas Mann which I suppose to be part of Mr. Nemerov's promised study, and best of all the discussions of Stevens, Tate, and Ransom are what we want from Mr. Nemerov and are not likely to get from anyone else: a serious excursion into what poets mean by what they say. Nemerov makes us feel that the literary criticism of other men is, like France, a despotism tempered by epigrams, while his own, for all of what Carlyle calls its “bisson conspectuities”, advances on the reader with a kind of pointed pepticity: avec cette sauce-là, on mangerait son père.

I should like to praise, beyond these expansive, well-rehearsed gestures, something more questionable, or at least something more often questioned, that Howard Nemerov has printed in this generous book [Poetry and Fiction], for I find with a frisson of self-suspicion that my particular pleasure is awakened by precisely the performance which, in the general chorus of respect that meets Mr. Nemerov's work these days and particularly in this book, is generally discounted (as by R. W. Flint, R. W. B. Lewis, R. M. Adams): I mean the many “occasional” reviews of minor and important poets, unknown and celebrated figures, often called into existence—the reviews, not the writers—by omnibus chronicles for the quarterlies. The raven, as we know, loves not ravens, and if one is distracted by diversity itself, it is galling to see a colleague “producing purpose from a collection of accidents, cryptically presented”. Yet that is Nemerov's achievement, an account of modern poetry “day by day”, in terms of the bubbles that burst on its surface, of the bubbles that do not burst, as well as of writers such as Whittemore and Kees who have not surfaced, and some student digs at translations by Ciardi, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Fowlie which have not left the ocean floor. A writer as self-critical as Mr. Nemerov, of course, has a reason for including all these pieces—they are occasional because they were occasioned by something important:

This ancient and continuing art, moralizing and even didactic without being, in its better works, in the least imperceptive of particulars, belongs to life, serves it, and is in the most devoted sense occasional, finding its subjects in the slightest as in the greatest events.

That is Nemerov on Yvor Winters, but also a description of what Nemerov has accomplished in his running commentary on contemporary verse—though surely a more intensive adjective of motion is required for the criticism which keeps crystallizing into these insights:

I have felt that poetry, for Spender, consists not so much in composition as in what is liberated (the sublime) from composition, and that accordingly, he is the least interested in technique, and the least accomplished, of these three poets [with Jarrell and Auden]. His subjects frequently are as screens, behind which he awaits the moment for breaking rhapsodically out, and this moment is not always opportune, so that the great phrase gets little or no authority from the poem, referring rather away from the poem and to “the world.”

So often, with Jarrell, the situation of the poem, and its action, if it has any, are set up and merely exploited for his identifiable pathos and irony, to such an extent that the development of the situation is careless and ill-written, and all the energies of the author concentrate on what can be said about it, usually very beautiful and very sad and very deep things that have, we often feel, a general relevance to “life” rather than a particular one to the poems in which they occur.

Alastair Reid's book can be taken as a compendium of style and even attitude for the beginner at specifically Modern Poetry. It is all here, the loneliness, the carelessly sauntering verse, wry humor, eccentric epithet, the grave and testamentary reverence about the treasures of the self as reflected, usually, in the sea. Guilt, love, childhood, the want of a tradition, are approached with a delicate and raffiné recklessness of speech and a clear innocence of eye which are, however, almost entirely literary in origin.

Finally, last of my free samples, I should like to instance this, on David Jones:

The poet, on this view, is the reciter of the ritual which keeps the world in being; but because the ritual these days has either fallen in disuse or is used for limited purposes (religion, ironically, having become a limited purpose), the poet must also be a rediscoverer, re-edifier who causes the purified and idealized history recited in the ritual to be freshly seen as penetrating and modifying our secular or supposed secular concerns, which is, after all, exactly what was proposed and achieved by Dante. Mr. Jones is aware of the immensity of the task, of difficulties which Dante faced and overcame, but also of many which, at this distance, it does not appear that Dante had to deal with. But it is a question, beyond that, whether the attempt in its nature may ever be unplanned or random, whether the assumption, to begin with, of ruins does not in a degree dishonor or make unavailing whatever fragments may be shored against them.

These are beads on a long, long string. Telling them, as Blake said of prayer, is the study of art.