Howard Nemerov Quotes
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Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?
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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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A chronicle is very different from history proper.
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A lot happens by accident in poetry.
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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.
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Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
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I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.
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When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.
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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.
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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.
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Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.
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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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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.
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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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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.
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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
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That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.
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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.
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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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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.
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Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.
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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.
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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Till I, high in the tower of my time Among familiar ruins, began to cry For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, Because all died, because I had to die. The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, And a child I slept.
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Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals
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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 writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -henceforth?- the subject to which you are condemned.
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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.
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