In 1963-1964, he was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.
Despite his apparent versatility, Nemerov is primarily a poet. The sheer industry, as well as the talent, which has gone into the making of his Collected Poems (1977) cannot fail to be impressive. By comparison, his output of novels seems relatively slight. There have been only three to date, and the last of the three, The Homecoming Game, appeared as long ago as 1957. All of the novels are out of print, and, since there is virtually no commentary on them other than the original reviews, they are perhaps in danger of being totally ignored. Each of them, however, reveals the same witty, ironic intelligence that has attracted Nemerov's readers to his poetry. Most of the criticism they received when they were new was centered around the complaint that they are not realistic enough, that the characters in them are unbelievable, the plots fantastic. Now, however, it seems clear that they were not intended to be realistic at all in the usual sense. They are essentially comedies about the dialogue that goes on in everyday life between imagination and reality.
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