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It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.
Howard Nemerov
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Howard Nemerov
Age: 71 †
Born: 1920
Born: February 29
Died: 1991
Died: July 5
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Pages
Iceberg
Literature
Bulk
May
Poems
Way
Appears
Like
Page
Third
Thirds
Surface
Icebergs
More quotes by Howard Nemerov
When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.
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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
Howard Nemerov
Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.
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I have a plot, but not much happens.
Howard Nemerov
Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.
Howard Nemerov
I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.
Howard Nemerov
History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.
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That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.
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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.
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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
Howard Nemerov
I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.
Howard Nemerov
Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
Howard Nemerov
Absolute power corrupts absolutely and if you surrender your personal responsibility to a government which promises to take care of you, they will only take care of themselves.
Howard Nemerov
I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.
Howard Nemerov
The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.
Howard Nemerov
