Howard Nemerov

I’ve never read a political poem that’s accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

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.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.