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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
Always
Line
Icy
Think
Lines
Mustn
Thinking
Literature
Frost
Lasts
Inclined
Last
Robert
Firsts
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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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
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History is where tensions were.
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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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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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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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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
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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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