Top 37 Quotes by Howard Nemerov

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

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

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

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

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.

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

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

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.

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.