Life & Wisdom Quote by Howard Nemerov

“A lot happens by accident in poetry” is the kind of line that quietly detonates the myth of the poet as mystic engineer, drafting revelation with a compass and a ruler. Nemerov, a poet who prized craft and clarity, isn’t romanticizing chaos; he’s demoting control. The word “accident” does double duty: it names both the unplanned turn a poem takes in the act of writing and the way meaning blooms for readers in ways the author can’t fully supervise. It’s an anti-totalitarian aesthetic in miniature: if poetry is alive, it has to be capable of surprising even its maker.

The intent is also defensive, almost tactical. By foregrounding accident, Nemerov makes room for failure, revision, and the messy backstage labor that polished poems usually conceal. “A lot” matters too. He’s not claiming genius is random; he’s claiming the decisive moments - the image that suddenly clicks, the line break that creates a second thought, the unintended pun that opens a new theme - are often discovered rather than invented. Poetry becomes less like delivering a message and more like conducting an experiment where language has its own agency.

Contextually, Nemerov wrote in a mid-century American landscape suspicious of both high-flown prophecy and confessional spillage. His work often threads wit and formal discipline, so the subtext here is a gentle warning to younger poets: technique is necessary, but it’s not sovereign. The poem’s best intelligence sometimes arrives sideways, wearing the mask of a mistake.