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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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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
Poem
Mostly
Telling
Close
Poetics
Literature
Inseparably
Thought
Verse
Come
Verses
Poetic

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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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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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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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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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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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 like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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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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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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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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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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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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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 secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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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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 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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History is where tensions were.
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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
Howard Nemerov