[In the following excerpt, Gunn offers a laudatory review of New and Selected Poems and discusses Nemerov's place in contemporary American poetry.]

Poetic theory in America is at present in an extremely curious state, resembling that of England during the Barons' Wars rather than that of a healthy democracy or wellrun autocracy. It is not even a decent civil war, tradition alist against modernist. At one extreme, it is true, there are the academic-suburban poets who aim so low that it is difficult to see why they bother to aim at all; at the other there are the remnants of the neo-Bohemians, who aim everywhere and thus nowhere. Between these comparative majorities of those who are timid or eccentric on principle exist the Barons, each commanding a troop of ill-equipped and determined fighters, and each against all the rest: Baron Bly, recommending a slightly surrealist imagery that looks a little old-fashioned nowadays; Baron Rexroth, exdirector of the Beat advertising campaign; Baron Fitts, who has just announced that the one distinguishing characteristic of true poetry is Strangeness; and a host of others who are convinced that they, and they alone, have discovered the criterion for good poetry. What is interesting, or rather, distressing, is that none of the Barons' retainers are good poets. Or if they are ever good, it is only when they can forget the precepts of their masters. Just as Herbert is good in so far as he is unlike the rest of the School of Donne, so James Wright, for example, is at his best only when he is not trying to write like Robert Bly.

The Barons certainly get the ear of the public; for one thing, they are mostly good journalists, and for another, they are so original. The result is that a Ginsberg, a Starbuck, an O'Gorman receives unlimited publicity for a brief season, while Howard Nemerov, Louis Simpson, Edgar Bowers, and a few others scarcely inferior are acknowledged only here and there, and often grudgingly. But it is these last, I suspect, who will still be read in fifty years' time. Part of their virtue lies in the very fact that they have not been seduced into literary politics: they have learned from the whole of literature, not merely from writers of a special kind; and they do not view the writing of poetry as a group activity, but as a lonely and difficult task for which the rules are so extraordinarily difficult to define that each poet must reformulate them for himself.

If one associates Nemerov with other poets, it would be only with the contributors to the defunct Furioso, who made up a group so loose that it hardly counted as such, including men as different as Coxe and Kees. He has always been, very individually, one of the best poets of his generation, but with the emergence of his New and Selected Poems it becomes necessary to class him outside the category of a mere generation; for the book makes it clear that he is one of the best poets writing in English.

Nemerov's early poems were like marvelous tricks, brilliant in themselves, but each in a sense isolated from the rest. In some of them it almost looked as if he were setting himself difficult problems in style and tone for their own sake. "History of a Literary Movement" and "Carol," for example, though they are excellent light verse, bear little relation to each other (in the way all of Robert Lowell's early poems bear a closely definable relation to each other) except in so far as they show an unusually efficient use of two different styles, parody and folksong. But the value of the apprenticeship served in the early poems becomes apparent in his succeeding work: for rhetoric is now an instrument with which he can pry open what he pleases.

He is at equal ease in the modes of epigram, comic poem, meditation, and narrative, yet his work in each is now clearly related to his work in all the rest. His style has great range. He can write the abstract statement of the following passage from "The Murder of William Remington," statement which is careful and qualified, and derives much of its strength from Renaissance writing.

There is the terror too of each man's thought,
That knows not, but must quietly suspect
His neighbor, friend, or self of being taught
To take an attitude merely correct;
Being frightened of his own cold image in
The glass of government, and his own sin,

Frightened lest senate house and prison wall
Be quarried of one stone, lest righteous and high

Look faintly smiling down and seem to call
A crime the welcome chance of liberty,
And any man an outlaw who aggrieves
The patriotism of a pair of thieves.

He can also, however, elaborate images in the much more casual, seemingly random manner of the beginning of "Writing":

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters,
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice.

What the two passages have in common, perhaps, is an easy authority of tone, by means of which particular observation is generally placed and generalization is seen in relation to a particular context.

The latest poems, occupying more than the first quarter of the book, are the most exciting. For from traditional materials he has fashioned a kind of blank verse which I believe to be, in Pound's sense, an invention. Its most striking characteristic is the almost continuous use of runovers. It is normally difficult to run-over many consecutive lines and still write good poetry, since the metrical norm tends to get lost, as we can see for example in the more breathless passages of "Endymion," by which Keats was protesting—a bit inadequately—against the tightness of eighteenth-century verse. The effect in Nemerov's poems, in say "Mrs. Mandrill" or "Death and the Maiden"—two of the best—is of an unceasing flow, an unchecked movement without looseness or breathlessness: the unit of the line is never destroyed or forgotten (though it is true, as often in blank verse, it has become less important than the unit of the paragraph), and the constant use of runovers, instead of causing the distintegration of form, has created a new form. I find this a technical invention of great importance, and have little doubt that Nemerov will have his imitators within a few years. What is more, the speed at which the verse moves enables the writer to introduce a great many juxtapositions of detail which would seem forced in a slower-moving verse. Seemingly discrepant images are caught up and absorbed by the swift movement to bring about a continuous enrichment and qualification of meaning.

Nemerov gets a wide range of material and tone into these passages, yet there is a unity of effect. There is in fact a concentration of experience without the loss of richness and variety that concentration can involve.

Most of the poems in this selection possess a similar authority, and are composed—to apply to him one of his own phrases—with "a singular lucidity and sweetness." It is a distinguished and important book.