SOURCE: Johnson, Tom. “Ideas and Order.” Sewanee Review 86 (summer 1978): 445-53.

In the following review of Collected Poems and Figures of Thought, Johnson defends Nemerov against critics who have accused him of being too academic.

Howard Nemerov is a poet known to most readers just well enough to be stereotyped. There are, in fact, two stereotypes regularly pasted upon his work. The first casts him as a good academic poet, which means that he teaches and writes criticism and that his poems are competent, intellectual, usually difficult, and usually dull. The second is by comparison unflattering; it is caught in the remark of an acquaintance who is an associate professor of English in a state university: he described Nemerov as a competent suburban poet. By which he meant, presumably, marginally competent, stuffy, hopelessly middleclass in concerns, unintellectual, and usually dull. This second attitude we shall dismiss, for the evidence...