Life & Wisdom Quote by Howard Nemerov

The line lands with a poet's best kind of heresy: beauty is not automatically a virtue. Nemerov admits to hoarding finales the way some writers hoard titles, then confessing the punchline - the loveliest line can sabotage the whole poem. It's an inversion of the workshop myth that you build toward the "perfect" closing. Here, perfection is the problem.

The intent is partly practical craft advice, partly a quiet attack on ornamental writing. A last line that's "much too beautiful" becomes a diva: it demands attention, pulls focus from the poem's internal logic, and retrofits everything before it into mere scaffolding. Nemerov's subtext is that poems aren't delivery systems for quotable epigrams; they're ecosystems. If the ending blooms louder than the rest, it reveals the poem's imbalance, not its triumph.

Context matters: Nemerov wrote in a postwar American moment suspicious of grand rhetorical flourishes, after modernism had trained readers to value structure, precision, and earned music over Victorian velvet. His work often carries a wry, disciplined intelligence - the sensibility of someone who knows language can seduce you into dishonesty. So the line is also an ethics statement: if the beauty isn't earned by the poem's argument, its emotional weather, its metaphors doing real work, then it's just a pretty lie at the end.

The real sting is how familiar the temptation is. Writers fall in love with their best sentence and start auditioning poems to justify it. Nemerov flips the power dynamic: the poem gets to reject the sentence.