SOURCE: Howard, Richard. “Some Poets in Their Prose.” Poetry 105, no. 6 (March 1965): 400-03.

In the following excerpted review of Poetry and Fiction, Howard praises Nemerov's evaluations of other poets.

An admiring frequenter of Howard Nemerov's verse and of his fiction, I found the big set-pieces of his criticism, an art of opinion as he calls it, as much to my expectations as to my taste: manly, delicate, serious, funny, industrious, graceful. Essays on Longfellow and on Two Gentlemen of Verona show what this mind, at its stretch, can do with professionally “unpromising” material. The piece on “Composition and Fate in the Short Novel”, one of the most illuminating studies of a genre I know, the adscititious essays on Thomas Mann which I suppose to be part of Mr. Nemerov's promised study, and best of all the discussions of Stevens, Tate, and Ransom are what we want from Mr. Nemerov...