For some readers and critics of poetry, Nemerov's work has always been highly regarded, and for others it has taken awhile to get there. Those who received it well in the beginning only mildly complained that the poetry was a bit too derivative of earlier, popular poets, especially Robert Frost. But the harsher critics faulted it for a different reason, as Ross Labrie explains in his book Howard Nemerov : "A further reason for the belated recognition of Nemerov's worth can be found in his quiet and resolute resistance to sentimentality and in his forthright pursuit of complex forms." Labrie goes on to say that "his subject matter has appeared to many to be overly erudite and esoteric" and that his reputation "was of a cloistered academic who spent a lot of his time in trying to perfect obsolete forms of prose and verse."

By the mid-...