SOURCE: A review of Reflexions on Poetry and Poetics. New Republic 166 (24 June 1972): 33.

In the following review of Reflexions on Poetry and Poetics, the critic notes that Nemerov is good at debunking what he considers ridiculous and at writing effectively in several styles of discourse.

Nemerov likes to wait in the grass for somebody to be stupid, then jump on him. He has been jumping now for more than 30 years and through a dozen or more books, and in this latest volume [Reflexions on Poetry and Poetics], a collection of miscellaneous lectures and reviews, he has a number of worthy targets. He jumps, for example, on the “and” in the title of a poetry bash he attended, “Poetry and the National Conscience,” by pointing out that the “and” confers “existence on whatever things stand to either side of it,” so that poetry, which under other circumstances might be found...