A biography for Howard Nemerovhasn’t been written yet.
“[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).”
“I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.”
“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.”
“Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.”
“A chronicle is very different from history proper.”
“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.”
“Language cares.”
“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.”
“I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.”
“I have a plot, but not much happens.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.”
“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.”