Howard Nemerov Quotes

Francis Webb is easily our greatest poet and one of the greatest poets in the world but he's hardly ever mentioned.

I just don't think most people put myself and Robert Frost in the same category.

I'm a big fan of the poet Mary Jo Salter, and although she doesn't need to be discovered at all - she's widely admired and anthologized and extremely accomplished - I wish she were a household name.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that.

It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.

Indonesian writers are so far behind in terms of global exposure compared with the Philippines and Japanese writers.

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.

Certainly, historically, there has been more attention given in the international media to Indian English-language writers than to Pakistani English-language writers. But that, in my opinion, was justified by the sheer number of excellent writers coming from India and the Indian diaspora.

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

The attention one gets from being a poet isn't great.

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.

Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.

Poets are supposed to be underappreciated, don't you know? There is always a strange reaction to those who become successful in their own lifetime, and so I always felt lucky that I made the living I did out of it.

Few in the Nineties would have ventured to prophesy that the remote dim singer of the Celtic Twilight would, in a new age, become the leading poet of the English-speaking world. None have disputed the claim of William Butler Yeats to that title.

The New York School poets are my godfathers creatively.

Greece, sound, thy Homer's, Rome thy Virgil's name, But England's Milton equals both in fame.

Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets;Jonson was theVirgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.

I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton.

Every author has the whole past to contend with; all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.

I'm sure that I'll never have another success like Harry Potter for the rest of my life, no matter how many books I write, and no matter whether they're good or bad.

The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.