Howard Nemerov Quotes
42 quotes
in 572 categories
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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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A lot happens by accident in poetry.
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A chronicle is very different from history proper.
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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 one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with…
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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,…
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I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got…
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The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in…
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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…
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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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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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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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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but…
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Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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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…
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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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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…
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