How it works

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

Howard Nemerov
Not a MindZip member yet
History
Nature
Poetry
Revolution
Random

Explore more quotes

I have a plot, but not much happens.
Howard Nemerov
Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?
Howard Nemerov
Language cares.
Howard Nemerov
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.
Howard Nemerov
I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.
Howard Nemerov
Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.
Howard Nemerov
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.
Howard Nemerov
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.
Howard Nemerov
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
Howard Nemerov
I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Howard Nemerov
When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.
Howard Nemerov
When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
Howard Nemerov
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.
Howard Nemerov
Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.
Howard Nemerov
I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.
Howard Nemerov
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.
Howard Nemerov
A lot happens by accident in poetry.
Howard Nemerov
A chronicle is very different from history proper.
Howard Nemerov
A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
Howard Nemerov
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.
Howard Nemerov
Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.
Howard Nemerov
We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.
Howard Nemerov
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.
Howard Nemerov
Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
Howard Nemerov
Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
Howard Nemerov
When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
Howard Nemerov
I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
Howard Nemerov
I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
Howard Nemerov
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.
Howard Nemerov
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.
Howard Nemerov
Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
Howard Nemerov
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.
Howard Nemerov
I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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.
Howard Nemerov
The spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me, so it's fairly even.
Howard Nemerov
When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
Howard Nemerov
The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
Howard Nemerov
The main thing is to make history, not to write it.
Otto von Bismarck
The sanctity of our battlefields, monuments, and veterans institutions is of utmost importance to preserve military history and pay respect to those who fought.
Henry Waxman
I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.
Vivienne Westwood
I don't have a strong interest in history.
Larry Niven
Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.
James A. Garfield
The big battle at the end of DW isn't drawn from history, but it's influenced by history, certainly.
Walter Jon Williams
I wanted to be a part of the Disney history.
Tia Carrere
Research is of considerable importance in certain fields, such as science and history.
Fred Saberhagen
What a year to live in! Worth all other times ever known in our history or any other.
Thomas Starr King
There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.
James Lovelock
The history of Christianity, therefore, must be of concern to all who are interested in the record of man and particularly to all who seek to understand the contemporary human scene.
Kenneth Scott Latourette