SOURCE: Wertime, Richard. “Poets' Prose.” Yale Review 74 (summer 1985): 605-08.

In the following excerpt from a review of several collections of criticism, Wertime praises the quality of Nemerov's New and Collected Essays.

[Nemerov is like] a lover of home improvements who is always building additions to his house, or revising its appearance. The “house” is no less than our conscious effort to come to grips with the human condition: I must say I was surprised by the theoretical vigor and the range of this collection. Nemerov writes well on a whole list of subjects: on metaphor, on meaning in poetry, on imagination in Blake and Wordsworth, on the revelatory basis of jokes and of poems. He writes with extraordinary grace on Lewis Thomas as well as on his friend, Kenneth Burke; and he is brilliant on what it is that centrally characterizes the short novel.

Indeed, there is a...