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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
Cases
Facts
Doesn
Nothing
Discern
Make
Terribly
Historian
Responsible
Case

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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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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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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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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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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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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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History is where tensions were.
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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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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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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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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 like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
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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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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 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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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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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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