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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.

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
Literature
Stories
Thing
Telling
Writers
Gave
Greatest
Modern

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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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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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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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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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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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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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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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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History is where tensions were.
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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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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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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
Howard Nemerov
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
Howard Nemerov
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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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I have a plot, but not much happens.
Howard Nemerov
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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.
Howard Nemerov