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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.

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
Make
Terribly
Historian
Responsible
Case
Cases
Facts
Doesn
Nothing
Discern

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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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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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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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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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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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
Howard Nemerov
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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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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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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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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 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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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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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.
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Howard Nemerov