Howard Nemerov Quotes

42 quotes in 572 categories

• I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
• A lot happens by accident in poetry.
• 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.
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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…
• The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in…
• 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…
• Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
• 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.
• Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
• 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.
• 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…
• Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.
• I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
• 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…
• I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
• 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…

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