Quotes By Howard Nemerov

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

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

Language cares.

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.

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.

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.

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

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

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.

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.

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.

We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.

I have a plot, but not much happens.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.