SOURCE: Carruth, Hayden. “In Their Former Modes.” New York Times Book Review (28 July 1968): 7.

In the following excerpt from a review of The Blue Swallows and Josephine Miles's Kinds of Affection, Carruth, a prominent literary critic, writes that Nemerov's use of irony and poetic conventions makes the poetry seem “tired.”

[Nemerov] belongs to the Eastern tradition, the tradition dominated first by Eliot and later by the poets associated with John Crowe Ransom. And their hallmark was “poetic irony.” One may search Nemerov's work up and down—his new book of poems [The Blue Swallows] being his sixth in 20 years—and find scarcely a statement that means what it says. Everything is wried away from literalness by the intrusion of the poet's ironic view. The ironic method is double-entendre; but when it is used too much, double-meaning slides over again into single-meaning; the literal meaning decays until it falls into...