Art & Creativity Quote by Howard Nemerov

Writing, for Nemerov, is a kind of temporary solipsism: you don’t so much argue a point as inhabit a mind so completely that alternatives stop existing. The line has the plainspoken snap of someone who knows how lofty “inspiration” rhetoric can get, and chooses instead to describe the quiet arrogance baked into composition. On the page, your assumptions feel like physics. You pick a metaphor, a cadence, a logic of cause-and-effect, and it all seems not merely persuasive but inevitable.

That’s the subtext: every sentence smuggles in a worldview, and the writer rarely notices the contraband. Nemerov isn’t confessing stupidity; he’s naming a structural blindness. While drafting, you can’t simultaneously stand inside your own sensibility and fully simulate the reader’s. Revision becomes less a polishing ritual than an ethical act: the moment you remember other minds exist. The quote also carries a poet’s awareness that language itself conspires in this. Words come with defaults, cultural freight, inherited hierarchies of what counts as “natural,” “reasonable,” “true.” To write fluently is to ride those rails.

Context matters, too. Nemerov’s career straddled an American century anxious about mass persuasion - advertising, propaganda, the televised public self. A poet observing that writers forget dissent isn’t just talking craft; he’s hinting at how easy it is for any confident voice to mistake its own clarity for consensus. The warning is small, almost offhand, which is why it lands: the most consequential blind spots rarely announce themselves as such.