Howard Nemerov's literary career has been a singularly wide-ranging and productive one. A teacher by profession (currently the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor of English at Washington University in Saint Louis), Nemerov is also a poet, a novelist, a short-story writer, and a literary critic. He was born in New York City in 1920 and educated at Harvard (A.B., 1941). After serving as a pilot during World War II, he returned to New York and completed his first book, a volume of poems entitled The Image and the Law, which was published in 1947. Over the years, he has taught at Hamilton College, Bennington College, Brandeis University, the University of Minnesota, and Hollins College. Although the critical response to his writing has been curiously mixed, with the same books generating both extremely favorable and extremely unfavorable opinions, overall he has enjoyed considerable success and received many honors and awards, such...