From Howard Nemerov's second book of poems [Guide to the Ruins] I receive the impression of a poet thoroughly immersed in a deep knowledge, capable of sarcasm, never removed or far from irony, yet he has not the Lowellian rage nor the Jarrellian fantasy; nor the Gregorian chant.

He is conscious of universal suffering, and of particular suffering as essential to many war situations. But he is not overwhelmed on the one hand, nor a didact on the other. He watches. He is able to maintain the artist's poise and detachment in every poem and thus not to become sentimental nor to preach. There is a good deal of satisfaction in this; his poems do not set the blood surging, for they have no astounding music, nor do they invite recoil and objection, for they have the merit of sincerity and command a large area of sense. One gets plenty of hard sense in Nemerov. “And money talks and things make sense.”

He is intellectual rather than sensuous, but something of both. He has the agenbite of inwit; a sense of the sinister, and a rich satirical twist. For a lovely lyric there is “Carol”; for irony, “The Ecstasies of Dialectic” or “Peace in Our Time.” His classical interests show in “Antigone”; his Hebraic in “A Song of Degrees,” “Nicodemus” and “To the Babylonians.” The last two stanzas from “Fables of a Moscow Subway” will show a characteristic style of his:

He read in the Timaeus once again
That the good old days were gone beneath the sea.
He seemed to understand, coughed once, and slept.
And then it was revealed to him in dream:
That Martin Luther shrieked aloud, Thou Pope!
And fled to England, and created the Boy Scouts,
Who were encamped above Lake Titicaca
And might invade the Rhineland if they wished.