Howard Nemerov Quotes about Literature

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.

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

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

When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

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.