SOURCE: Lask, Thomas. “Books: Two Approaches to Understand Poetry.” New York Times (16 December 1978): C14.

In the following excerpt from a review of Figures of Thought and John Wain's Professing Poetry, Lask notes Nemerov's impatience with critics who dwell heavily on formal poetic analysis while ignoring reader response.

Mr. Nemerov's book [Figures of Thought] is rather amorphous in character, and its title indicates a pattern of thinking rather than persons to think about. … Broadly speaking, his book is an attack on the kind of approach to a poem that subjects the work to a thorough analysis but fails to convey its poetic quality. Mr. Nemerov is sardonic about those commentators who get the meaning but miss the experience.

Against Any Poetic Schematic

“Students of what are called the Creative Processes,” he writes, “do not observably turn into artists, and when the depths of things are exposed to the dry...