Howard Nemerov

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“A lot happens by accident in poetry.”

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

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

“A teacher is a person who never says anything once.”

“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 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.”

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

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