"Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful"
About this Quote
Every teacher knows the shiver Nemerov describes: a line lands with uncanny rightness, and the room goes briefly quiet. The thrill isn’t just that a student has made something “beautiful and moving.” It’s the suspense that follows. Was that sentence a lucky collision of sound and sense, or the first reliable signal of a mind learning its own reach?
Nemerov’s intent is partly protective, partly reverent. He’s pushing back against the tidy myth of talent as something instantly legible. In workshops and classrooms we’re trained to diagnose: promise, weakness, voice, craft. He reminds us that art refuses prompt grading. The subtext is a warning against premature certainty in either direction. Don’t flatter the student into performance-anxiety by declaring them “a natural.” Don’t dismiss them because the next draft stumbles. Early brilliance can be both accident and prophecy, and the difference often can’t be known on the timescale of a semester.
Context matters: Nemerov was a poet who took form and discipline seriously, which makes his openness to “accident” telling. He’s acknowledging what poets rarely admit in public: that inspiration can precede understanding, that a writer can produce a truth before they can reliably reproduce the method. The line also shifts the spotlight from the student to the observer. “You won’t know for years” implicates the teacher’s ego and impatience; the real lesson is humility, and a long view of development that resists the classroom’s demand for instant narrative arcs.
Nemerov’s intent is partly protective, partly reverent. He’s pushing back against the tidy myth of talent as something instantly legible. In workshops and classrooms we’re trained to diagnose: promise, weakness, voice, craft. He reminds us that art refuses prompt grading. The subtext is a warning against premature certainty in either direction. Don’t flatter the student into performance-anxiety by declaring them “a natural.” Don’t dismiss them because the next draft stumbles. Early brilliance can be both accident and prophecy, and the difference often can’t be known on the timescale of a semester.
Context matters: Nemerov was a poet who took form and discipline seriously, which makes his openness to “accident” telling. He’s acknowledging what poets rarely admit in public: that inspiration can precede understanding, that a writer can produce a truth before they can reliably reproduce the method. The line also shifts the spotlight from the student to the observer. “You won’t know for years” implicates the teacher’s ego and impatience; the real lesson is humility, and a long view of development that resists the classroom’s demand for instant narrative arcs.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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