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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
Last
Robert
Firsts
Poem
First
Fake
Real
Agree
Always
Line
Icy
Think
Lines
Mustn
Thinking
Literature
Frost
Lasts
Inclined

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This Constitutional Republic called America is an historic aberration. Any honest student of history will note that the prevailing socio-economic system is feudalism, where a tiny minority control the vast majority of wealth, power, and resources. In doing so, they have absolute control over the 99% of the population. Power equals control.
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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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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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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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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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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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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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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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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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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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 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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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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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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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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