Howard Nemerov Quotations

This Constitutional Republic called America is an historic aberration. Any honest student of history will note that the prevailing socio-economic system is feudalism, where a tiny minority control the vast majority of wealth, power, and resources. In doing so, they have absolute control over the 99% of the population. Power equals control.

Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.

Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.

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.

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.

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.

History is where tensions were.

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

I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.

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.