Life & Wisdom Quote by Howard Nemerov

It lands like a shrug, then keeps echoing: poetry as an occasional accident, not a priestly vocation. Howard Nemerov’s line deflates the romantic myth of the Poet as permanently plugged into the sublime. “Once in awhile” demotes inspiration to a sporadic event, the way a good idea interrupts your commute. The wit is in the casualness; he treats the thought as primary and the rhyme as a secondary reflex, almost an afterthought. That reversal is the point. Nemerov is needling the notion that rhyme itself is the engine of meaning, insisting instead that form is a tool you pick up when the mind produces something worth shaping.

The subtext is both modest and mildly combative. Modest, because he’s sketching a craft practice: a poet is someone who notices a thought and then does the work of making it memorable. Combative, because it quietly mocks the expectation that poets must be perpetually profound or emotionally extravagant. “You rhyme it” also has a faintly comic, instructional tone, like advice given to a beginner: don’t mystify this; do the technique.

Context matters: Nemerov wrote through decades when American poetry was arguing about form versus free verse, inherited music versus conversational plainness. His own reputation sits in that middle zone: formal intelligence without fussy reverence. The line positions rhyme not as a decorative cage but as a pressure system that sharpens the thought, makes it stick, and maybe exposes its hidden logic. Poetry, here, is less thunderbolt than craftsmanship with timing.