SOURCE: Rubin, Lewis D. Jr. “Well Worth the Saying.” Kenyon Review 26, no. 2 (spring 1964): 411-14.

In the following essay, Rubin says that Nemerov's book of critical essays Poetry and Fiction is a valuable, non-ideological, detached approach to criticism.

When Howard Nemerov's most recent book of poems, The Next Room of the Dream, was published last year, one reviewer quoted some lines from the book, compared them with some of Nemerov's earliest published work, and concluded that as a poet Nemerov had come a long way. So he has. The better poems in the recent book differ sharply from the verse that he was publishing back in the middle and late 1940s.

I mention this because in the preface to this collection of critical essays [Poetry and Fiction], his first such, Nemerov begins by saying something that is markedly different from the usual line that is handed out by poets...