Howard Nemerov
Howard Nemerov
Howard Nemerovwas an American poet. He was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. For The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov, he won the National Book Award for Poetry, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth29 February 1920
CountryUnited States of America
becomes cannot death escape examine except present subject unable
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.
butler great william
When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
love teach time
We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.
america population minorities
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.
long over-you stories
Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
kings power president
Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
beautiful moving years
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.
poetic verses
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.
character mean stories
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.
tension
History is where tensions were.
writing literature yeats
When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
children ugly my-children
I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
thinking innovation literature
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.
beautiful hypnosis years
I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.