Top 37 Quotes by Howard Nemerov

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

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.

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

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

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.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.