Howard Nemerov Quotes

Believe it or not, one of the first poets I was aware of was Yeats. I recited 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' at a verse speaking competition when I was eight or nine.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

Emily Dickinson has great sound and sense.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

I like poems that are little games.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.

Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality, a natural flow. The separate stanzas aid in perpetuating a kind of incremental reading, one small chunk at a time.

The difference between 'lighght' and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn't have a reading process. Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn't. You can see it all at once. It's instant.

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

As a lyricist, I'm really trying to raise my level of quality.

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.