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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
Discern
Nothing
Terribly
Make
Historian
Responsible
Case

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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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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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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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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History is where tensions were.
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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.
Howard Nemerov
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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
Howard Nemerov
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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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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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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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 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.
Howard Nemerov
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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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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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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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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
Howard Nemerov
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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
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
Howard Nemerov
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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.
Howard Nemerov
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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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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
Howard Nemerov