Art & Creativity Quote by Howard Nemerov

Nemerov’s line is a deliberate provocation dressed up as modesty: an insistence that the real engine of poetry is not calculation but arrival. “We don’t consider. We don’t think” isn’t an anti-intellectual creed so much as a jab at the era’s worship of method, theory, and respectable “craft” as a kind of moral credential. He’s staking a claim for the uncanny part of making art - the moment when language feels less manufactured than received.

The sentence structure does the work. Those clipped, categorical negatives (“don’t consider. don’t think.”) sound like a manifesto, but the payoff is disarmingly small: “a little verse.” Nemerov undercuts the grandiosity we’re trained to attach to Art with a lowercase, almost self-mocking scale. That’s the subtext: poets aren’t priests or engineers; they’re people catching something on the wing, often without fully understanding what they’ve caught.

Context matters. Nemerov wrote in a postwar American poetry world increasingly split between academic formalism and avant-garde experimentation, both of which could fetishize deliberation in different ways (meter as mastery, rupture as program). His stance threads a needle: he’s not denying revision or intelligence, he’s defending the first spark as irreducible and slightly embarrassing to explain. The intent is protective as well as polemical: to keep poetry from becoming a bureaucratic performance of “seriousness,” and to remind readers that the mind at its most alive sometimes looks, from the outside, like not thinking at all.