Quotes from Howard Nemerov

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

The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.

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

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

History is where tensions were.

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

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

I have a plot, but not much happens.

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.

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

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

Language cares.

Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.

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.

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.

We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

Children, to be illustrious is sad.

Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

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.

Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.