Top 25 Howard Nemerov Quotes

I have a plot, but not much happens.

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

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.

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.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn’t give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

Language cares.

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 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.

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

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’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.

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

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

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

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