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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.
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
First
Fake
Real
Agree
Line
Icy
Always
Lines
Mustn
Think
Literature
Frost
Thinking
Lasts
Inclined
Last
Robert
Firsts
Poem
More quotes by Howard Nemerov
When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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History is where tensions were.
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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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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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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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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.
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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.
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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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.
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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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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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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
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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.
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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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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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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
Howard Nemerov
