Howard Nemerov

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

— Howard Nemerov

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

— Howard Nemerov

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

— Howard Nemerov

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

— Howard Nemerov

Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want…

— Howard Nemerov

Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an…

— Howard Nemerov

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

— Howard Nemerov

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

— Howard Nemerov

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

— Howard Nemerov

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

— Howard Nemerov

When in still air and still in summertime A leaf has had enough of this, it seems To make up its mind…

— Howard Nemerov

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

— Howard Nemerov

I have a plot, but not much happens.

— Howard Nemerov

Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real…

— Howard Nemerov

Till I, high in the tower of my time Among familiar ruins, began to cry For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime,…

— Howard Nemerov

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first…

— Howard Nemerov

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

— Howard Nemerov

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

— Howard Nemerov

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

— Howard Nemerov

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

— Howard Nemerov

Children, to be illustrious is sad.

— Howard Nemerov

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

— Howard Nemerov

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

— Howard Nemerov

I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line…

— Howard Nemerov

This Constitutional Republic called America is an historic aberration. Any honest student of history will note that the prevailing socio-economic system is…

— Howard Nemerov