SOURCE: Spears, Monroe K. “Howard Nemerov's Best Book.” Sewanee Review 99 (fall 1991): 669-73.

In the following essay, Spears speaks of Nemerov's longtime association with the Sewanee Review and praises the selections in A Howard Nemerov Reader.

In opening the Sewanee Writers' Conference in July, Wyatt Prunty read an eloquent tribute to Howard Nemerov, who had been so prominent and benign a presence at the 1990 conference and had been scheduled to teach again at this one. The most dramatic moment of the conference occurred when Mona Van Duyn, Howard's close friend and neighbor, closed her reading by telling how her own fine poem, “Endings,” provoked Howard's last poem, “The End of the Opera,” and then by reading both poems very effectively. Though extremely moving, her commentary was wholly unsentimental: her point was that strong dislike of her poem was Howard's inspiration for writing his own. “The End of the Opera...