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History is where tensions were.

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
Tensions
Tension
History

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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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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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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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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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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
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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.
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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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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
Howard Nemerov