Top 37 Quotes by Howard Nemerov

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

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

The spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me, so it's fairly even.

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

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.

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.

The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.

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.

Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.