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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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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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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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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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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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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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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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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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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.
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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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 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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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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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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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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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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