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"Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it."
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"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him."

"Never underestimate the power of a simple thought."

"I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'."

"I thought it completely absurd to mention my name in the same breath as the presidency."

"In Socrates' thought the two marks of individual self-consciousness appear; it is practical and it is social."
Explore more quotes by Howard Nemerov


"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 through that fairly early."


"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."


"Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?"


"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."


"I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants."


"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."


"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."


"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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