Howard Nemerov Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

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

Howard Nemerov
That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.

Howard Nemerov
It was hard to say, about football as about games in general, which was more impressive, the violence or the rationality.

Howard Nemerov
Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.

Howard Nemerov
Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated.

Howard Nemerov
When Moses in Horeb struck the rock,
And water came forth out of the rock,
Some of the people were annoyed with Moses And said he should have used a fancier stick.

Howard Nemerov
The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present – henceforth? – the subject to which you are condemned.

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
When in still air and still in summertime
A leaf has had enough of this, it seems
To make up its mind to go; fine as a sage
Its drifting in detachment down the road.

Howard Nemerov
Flaubert wanted to write a novel
About nothing.

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
Till I, high in the tower of my time Among familiar ruins, began to cry For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, Because all died, because I had to die. The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, And a child I slept.

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
It's one of the unforeseen disabilities of teaching as a profession that when senility sets in it happens in public.

Howard Nemerov
The world is full of mostly invisible things, And there is no way but putting the mind's eye, Or its nose, in a book, to find them out, Things like the square root of Everest Or how many times Byron goes into Texas, Or whether the law of the excluded middle Applies west of the Rockies.

Howard Nemerov
His lordly darkness decked in filth Bearded with weed like a lady's favor, He is a black planet.

Howard Nemerov
Praise without end the go-ahead zeal
of whoever it was invented the wheel;
but never a word for the poor soul's sake
that thought ahead, and invented the brake.

Howard Nemerov
There is in space a small black hole
Through which, say our astronomers,
The whole damn thing, the universe,
Must one day fall. That will be all.

Howard Nemerov
And I speak to you now with the land's voice,
It is the cold wild land that says to you
A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things:
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

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