Art & Creativity Quote by Howard Nemerov

Writing often begins in a trance of certainty: the sentence in your head feels so right that the possibility of a rival thought scarcely exists. Howard Nemerov names that spell, the moment when the mind takes its own alignment for the world's alignment. It is a familiar cognitive trap, akin to the false-consensus effect, but heightened by the solitude of composition. The writer hears only one voice and assumes it is the voice.

Nemerov, a poet of exacting form and wry intelligence, understood how seductive that inward consensus can be. Coming of age in the mid-20th century, after war and amid skepticism about stable meanings, he still championed clarity and craft. His work prizes the friction between private perception and public language, and the remark points to the ethical dimension of that friction. If you forget that somebody could think differently, you not only misread your audience; you also risk flattening reality, turning language into a mirror that reflects only yourself.

There is a practical lesson here about drafting and revision. First thoughts arrive with the glamour of inevitability. Later, craft asks for the discipline to imagine a mind unlike your own: a reader who does not share your assumptions, a cadence that might carry someone from doubt to recognition. Audience awareness is not pandering; it is a form of hospitality. It keeps metaphor from becoming private shorthand, irony from becoming smugness, and argument from becoming scold.

Nemerov's line also suggests a paradox at the heart of art. The necessary confidence to write arises from believing your vision is worth stating. The necessary humility to be read arises from knowing it is not universal. His career, crowned with both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, demonstrates how far a writer can go by balancing those forces: trusting the inner voice, then tuning it so that somebody different can hear it too.