Howard Nemerov Quotes

I've spent so much time with iambic pentameter that I can now recognize it when I hear it in conversation or a movie - it's like a weird, useless superpower.

The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

Poetry stands or falls by its music.

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.

When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.

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

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

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

I feel that I'm a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it's the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer.

The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

Generally speaking, rhyme is the marker for the end of a line. The first rhyme-word is like a challenge thrown down, which the poem itself has to respond to.

You have to learn a few things, which you do along the way, but basically, poetry is a matter of the ear. Iambic pentameters or what constitutes a stanza comes naturally - your ears will know.

After you kind of find your footing, sonnets are what comes easiest.

A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.

The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.