SOURCE: A review of Guide to the Ruins, in Poetry (Chicago), Vol. LXXVI, No. VI, September, 1950, pp. 365-70.

In the excerpt below, Shulenberger provides a mixed review of Guide to the Ruins, commenting on Nemerov's poetic style and the influence of Ezra Pound and William Shakespeare on his works.

Among the forty poems in Mr. Nemerov's second book [Guide to the Ruins] there are several kinds: epigram, song, sonnet, fragment, and brief essay. They are written in formal or near-formal verse, and are concerned chiefly with the contemporary scene, "the ruins" of a post-war world. In the absence of many positive qualities, their striking characteristic is chiefly their conventionality. They employ conventions of tone, meter, and attitude. The most widely conventional tone of modern serious verse since at least the early work of E. A. Robinson has been that of irony, and many of these poems are heavily...