SOURCE: DeMott, Benjamin. “Assertions, Appreciations.” New York Times Book Review (16 April 1978): 11.

In the following review, DeMott praises Figures of Thought as a collection of erudite essays which touch deeper matters than mere literary criticism.

“I am neither historian nor philosopher,” says the poet Howard Nemerov in Figures of Thought, a volume of subtly linked literary essays, “and this is not the occasion for a philosophical discourse or one on the history of mind.” Flanks covered, scouts out, whereupon a critic is free to do what he pleases, including history and philosophy. There is, in fact, rather more of both in this book than in most such collections. At the core of the majority of the pieces—the subjects include Dante, Joyce, the nature of modern poetry and the sins of contemporary criticism—lies an assumption about the direction of the modern history of the mind. And it's when...