Top 37 Quotes by Howard Nemerov

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 am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

Language cares.

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

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

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

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've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

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