SOURCE: Gage, John T. A review of Figures of Thought. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37 (spring 1979): 373-76.

In the following review, Gage says that Figures of Thought exhibits Nemerov's tendency to approach a subject from a variety of directions, especially the question of what happens to thought when it is expressed.

Howard Nemerov's new collection of essays contains speculations on subjects as diverse as the graphic art of M. C. Escher and the nature of time, each subject providing, however, but another background on which to flash his constant interest: what happens to thought when it becomes expression. In one essay, he tells of attending a night baseball game and suddenly discovering what Dante is up to in his use of symbolic figures in the Divine Comedy, by imagining how Cross and Eagle would look if flashed across the electric scoreboard. The book is full of such...