73 Quotes by Howard Nemerov

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.

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.

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

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

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

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.

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