Howard Nemerov Quotes About Literature
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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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A chronicle is very different from history proper.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
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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.
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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.
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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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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.
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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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.
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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
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The spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me, so it's fairly even.
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