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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
Surface
Icebergs
Pages
Iceberg
Literature
Bulk
May
Poems
Way
Appears
Like
Page
Third
Thirds

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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.
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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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.
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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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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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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
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History is where tensions were.
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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals
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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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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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.
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Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
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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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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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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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