Howard Nemerov Quotes

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.

For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely; and if you surrender your personal responsibility to a government which promises to take care of you, they will only take care of themselves.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.

[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).

The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.

Writing is like the relationship with your bowels. First you can, then you can't. Finally, you must. Only then should you reach for the paper.

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

When in still air and still in summertime A leaf has had enough of this, it seems To make up its mind to go; fine as a sage Its drifting in detachment down the road.

Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.

Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.

Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.

I have a plot, but not much happens.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

History is where tensions were.

When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.

Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals

The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.

Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.

I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.

The spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me, so it's fairly even.

Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated.

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

Children, to be illustrious is sad.

Language cares.