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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.

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
Verses
Anymore
Clear
Free
Learn
Things
Verse

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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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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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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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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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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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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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
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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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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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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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.
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.
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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.
Howard Nemerov
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
Howard Nemerov
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
Howard Nemerov
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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.
Howard Nemerov
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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
Howard Nemerov