Life & Wisdom Quote by Howard Nemerov

Craft talk usually wants a clean diagram: first you think, then you write, then you revise. Nemerov refuses the schematic. “Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably” is a poet’s quiet heresy against the workshop-industrial fantasy that content can be poured into form like liquid into a mold. He’s pointing to a lived fact of lyric making: meter, line break, and sound aren’t decorative packaging for an idea; they are the engine that generates the idea. In that sense, he’s also defending poetry’s autonomy in a culture that keeps asking it to justify itself in prose.

The second sentence is the slyer move. “In my poem Poetics, it’s as close as I come to telling how I do it” reads like modesty, but it’s really a principled withholding. Nemerov signals that any “method” he could explain would be a counterfeit, because the moment you translate process into instructions, you turn a private act of attention into a public recipe. The self-awareness matters: he knows readers want the backstage pass, and he offers the nearest thing while insisting that the backstage is mostly darkness and habit.

Contextually, this fits a mid-century American poet skeptical of both confession-as-brand and theory-as-credential. Nemerov stakes out a third posture: disciplined, humorous, craft-haunted. The line lands because it treats poetry as thinking in its own medium, not thinking plus ornament.