Life & Wisdom Quote by Howard Nemerov

A poet “insisting” on sense sounds almost quaint, which is exactly why it lands. Nemerov is pushing back against a mid-century prestige economy that often treated obscurity as a proxy for depth. The verb matters: insist suggests both principle and discipline, a refusal to let inspiration off the hook. He’s not promising plainness or preaching “clarity” as a moral virtue; he’s staking a claim that poems can be intellectually legible without being intellectually cheap.

The second half of the line is quietly strategic. “What I hope is sense” admits fallibility and leaves room for complexity, misreading, and the irreducible weirdness of metaphor. Yet he draws a hard boundary: there must be “always a coherent narrative or argument” the reader can “follow.” That’s a readerly ethic in an era when avant-garde experimentation could turn the audience into collateral damage. Nemerov’s subtext: difficulty is fine; abandonment is not. You can challenge the reader, but you can’t make confusion the whole aesthetic.

Contextually, it fits a poet who moved between formal rigor and sly intelligence, writing in a period where New Criticism prized close reading while other currents flirted with anti-communication. Nemerov’s line is a compact manifesto for craft as hospitality: the poem as a designed pathway, not a locked room. It’s also a bid for accountability. If the poem is an argument, it can be tested, resisted, answered. That’s a bracing idea for a genre often treated as pure mood.