Life & Wisdom Quote by Howard Nemerov

A poet admitting he’d speak in iambic pentameter “if it were easier” is a joke with barbs: it punctures the romantic image of the poet as someone who naturally breathes in perfect lines. Nemerov makes craft, not inspiration, the punchline. The meter isn’t presented as an elevated ideal so much as an inconvenient tool - something he’d gladly default to if only the tongue, the day, the body would cooperate. That friction is the point.

The subtext is an argument about what poetry costs. Iambic pentameter is the most “normal” of English meters, close to conversational cadence, yet it still requires constant micro-decisions: where stress falls, what word order must be bent, what nuance gets sacrificed for beat. By pretending the only obstacle is ease, Nemerov slyly confesses how much labor hides behind poems that sound effortless. It’s a craftsman’s humility disguised as laziness.

Context matters: Nemerov wrote in a 20th-century literary landscape where free verse carried the aura of modern authenticity and formal meter could be treated as antique or elitist. His line flips that politics. Meter isn’t a museum piece; it’s practical, even tempting - a technology for thinking in rhythm. The irony is that “easier” here means “more automatic,” and Nemerov knows automation is the enemy of attention. The quip defends form by admitting its nuisance: poetry, at its best, is difficulty made audible.