"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
A teacher of poets and a poet himself, Howard Nemerov captures the uncertainty at the heart of artistic beginnings. A student may write a passage that glows with beauty and feeling, yet even an experienced mentor cannot say whether it is a lucky convergence or the emergence of a voice. The line between accident and talent is thin because early work often contains both: flashes of instinct and music that the writer does not yet know how to reproduce. The only test is time, because only time reveals a pattern. If such intensity returns, grows steadier, and acquires craft, then the spark was not an anomaly but the first sign of a sustained fire.
The remark is also a quiet manifesto about teaching. It counsels patience, humility, and restraint. Praise too soon and you might trap a student in imitation of a single success; dismiss too soon and you might extinguish what would have become a vocation. The teacher’s job, Nemerov suggests, is not to prophesy but to keep the conditions of growth alive: attention, honest response, and the reminder that art matures through repeated attempts. Accidents are not worthless. They are the moments that show what is possible, giving both teacher and student a glimpse worth protecting until skill can catch up.
Nemerov earned the authority to say this. As a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet who taught for decades, including at Washington University in St. Louis, he saw the long arc of development. He knew that inspiration is real but unreliable, and that the difference between a fluke and a future often comes down to persistence, revision, and the slow sharpening of taste. The sentence honors the mystery of talent without romanticizing it. It asks for faith without gullibility: to recognize beauty when it appears, to help it return, and to accept that only years will tell what, exactly, has begun.
The remark is also a quiet manifesto about teaching. It counsels patience, humility, and restraint. Praise too soon and you might trap a student in imitation of a single success; dismiss too soon and you might extinguish what would have become a vocation. The teacher’s job, Nemerov suggests, is not to prophesy but to keep the conditions of growth alive: attention, honest response, and the reminder that art matures through repeated attempts. Accidents are not worthless. They are the moments that show what is possible, giving both teacher and student a glimpse worth protecting until skill can catch up.
Nemerov earned the authority to say this. As a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet who taught for decades, including at Washington University in St. Louis, he saw the long arc of development. He knew that inspiration is real but unreliable, and that the difference between a fluke and a future often comes down to persistence, revision, and the slow sharpening of taste. The sentence honors the mystery of talent without romanticizing it. It asks for faith without gullibility: to recognize beauty when it appears, to help it return, and to accept that only years will tell what, exactly, has begun.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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