[In the following excerpt from a review of several collections of criticism, Wertime praises the quality of Nemerov's New and Collected Essays.]

[Nemerov is like] a lover of home improvements who is always building additions to his house, or revising its appearance. The “house” is no less than our conscious effort to come to grips with the human condition: I must say I was surprised by the theoretical vigor and the range of this collection. Nemerov writes well on a whole list of subjects: on metaphor, on meaning in poetry, on imagination in Blake and Wordsworth, on the revelatory basis of jokes and of poems. He writes with extraordinary grace on Lewis Thomas as well as on his friend, Kenneth Burke; and he is brilliant on what it is that centrally characterizes the short novel.

Indeed, there is a great deal to commend in this volume. New and Selected Essays by Howard Nemerov belongs on that shelf of essay collections which can permanently alter a person's way of thinking. I remember how Updike once said of reading Proust that it revealed to him “a whole new use for the human nervous system,” or words to that effect; and while the impact of Nemerov's thinking on me isn't quite that grand, it is of that kind. In a prefatory essay, Kenneth Burke speaks of Nemerov's “plenitude” of thought (he also says that Nemerov is good at “retrieval”). I like Burke's word; it captures Nemerov's extraordinary ability to set thought skating into hitherto-unsuspected richness of implication. The writer who most nearly resembles Nemerov in this, to my mind, is the psychoanalyst Leslie H. Farber, with whose essays, especially in Lying, Despair, Jealousy, Envy, Sex, Suicide, Drugs, and the Good Life, Nemerov's share affinities of tone and approach. Nemerov, like Farber, is a confident and supple prose stylist, idiomatic and informal but very rarely chatty; and again like Farber, Nemerov has an unnerving habit of getting at things with a casual and yet surprisingly well-aimed turn. Both writers are humanists in the largest sense.

The volume leads off with Burke's thirty-page encomium, which I found myself quitting after some dozen pages: I lacked the context which the essays could offer me, so I went on ahead and read Nemerov first, then came back later and finished Burke's essay. It's a good introduction—typically Burkean in its headlong quality, its stylistic irritations, its summarizing power.

It might be best to distinguish the categories into which the essays in this collection fall. There are, first and foremost, the theoretical essays, which constitute the backbone: these include “The Swaying Form: A Problem in Poetry,” “Composition and Fate in the Short Novel,” “Bottom's Dream: The Likeness of Poems and Jokes,” “On Metaphor,” “Poetry and Meaning,” and “On the Measure of Poetry.” Then there are the essays on individual writers, which are all good: two on Wallace Stevens; two on Thomas Mann; an essay on Kenneth Burke; and others on Dante, Blake and Wordsworth, and finally Rainer Maria Rilke.

Next come occasional pieces—a commencement address at Bennington, an offering to a newspaper's centennial celebration, an interview with Nemerov, a whimsical speech made at a Burns Society meeting, the stand-in performance for an ailing Lewis Thomas—and last, the jeux. The jeux and the occasional pieces tend to overlap.

A number of refrains emerge as we read. One of the most central among them has to do with the reciprocity between the reality we experience and the matter of language, which keeps us from pitching into the void. In a manner reminiscent of Erich Kahler's The Inward Turn of Narrative, Nemerov says:

Poetry, I would say, is, in its highest ranges, no mere playing with the counters of meaning, but a perpetual rederiving of the possibility of meaning from matter, of the intelligible world from the brute recalcitrance of things. Poetry differs from thought in this respect, that thought eats up the language in which it thinks. Thought is proud, and always wants to forget its humble origin in things. … The business of poetry is to bring thought back into relation with the five wits, the five senses which Blake calls “the chief inlets of the soul in this age,” to show how our discontents, as Shakespeare finely says of Timon's, “are unremovably coupled to nature.” So the ivory tower must always be cut from the horn of Behemoth.

… As to the poet himself, one might add this. Writing is a species of askesis, a persevering devotion to the energy passing between self and the world. It is a way of living, a way of being, and though it does produce results in the form of words, these may come to seem of secondary importance to the person so engaged.

Nemerov also insists, in a more assertive vein, that the relations of subject and object, knowledge and meaning, poem and interpretation, the abstract and material are helplessly and necessarily implicated in paradox, the absolute paradox which stands as a motto on a shield in Pericles: “That which nourishes me extinguishes me.” The paradoxical habit of thought leads Nemerov to the gloomy and worrisome speculation that “poetry in English is coming to an end,” and I get irritated at times with his near-relativistic position on the extent to which the symbolic creates our world, since on occasions (in low moods, usually) he appears on the verge of an almost-comfortable if despairing solipsism.

But such outlining does him little justice, for it is the texture of his thinking that is exhilarating, and not the Grand Propositions—though one of the latter (his favorite) is sturdy indeed: “Poetry is getting something right in language.” This aphorism, incidentally, rescues Nemerov from his tilt toward solipsism, for he insists, over and over, that poetic invention is discovery, and hence discrimination between the “in-tune” and “not-in-tune,” the “right” and the “wrong,” the here/there and not-here/there.

Another of the refrains which punctuates Nemerov's thinking is the notion of being “serviceable”: as a poet, teacher, critic, as a citizen of the world. The “serviceable” is chiefly what enlarges people's minds or issues them new methods for contending with unawareness. The theoretical essays and the studies of particular writers are the ones most wealthy in serviceable lore. Here are two examples of the theoretical lore:

When you look at a poem you see that it goes down the page and goes across the page; not quite as prose does, for in prose going across the page is only a way of going down the page. Prose is a way of getting on, poetry a way of lingering. Going across the page, that is, becomes something like an independent dimension. … Poetry shares with prose the phrase, the sentence, and even something which the strophe has to do with the paragraph; only the line, the idea of the line, is distinctive.

And this:

the tradition of the short novel … is a tradition of masterpieces. … The authors of such works are masters in parable and reality simultaneously. … What we may insist is that these works combine with their actions a most explicit awareness of themselves as parables, as philosophic myths, and almost invariably announce and demonstrate the intention of discursive profundity—the intention, it is not too much to say, of becoming sacred books.

Nemerov repeatedly combines close observation with synthesizing vigor to produce surprising insights. In the second of these two essays, the one on the short novel, he also notes, “people read novellas, but they tend to live in novels, and sometimes they live there very comfortably indeed”—and having made this wry comment, he goes on to speak of theme in terms that are cogent and apt.