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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.

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
Promise
Personal
Responsibility
Corrupts
Power
Promises
Care
Surrender
Government
Absolutes
Take
Absolute
Absolutely

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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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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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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 like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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History is where tensions were.
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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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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 would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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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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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.
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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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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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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 you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
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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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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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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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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