Verse Quotes

Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.

Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

Some things remain fragments, just the lyrics and melodies or a line or two or a verse.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

Well, it's a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

You even called me stupid in your verse, and I'm almost agreeing, for where stupidity is involved, you are quite an expert, friend.

Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

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.

All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

Sometimes I'll sing the same verse through the entire song, because the other verses aren't clicking. And when they do come to me, I'm in the middle of that same verse!

You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.

The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin,' in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same.

Do it again on the next verse, and people think you meant it.

No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.

I was born to travel and write verse.

One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise.

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand, But they are not the Life for which they stand.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

I recorded harp first or singing first. I recorded it all together. Part of the reason is that I don't know how to play the songs without also singing. I forget how they progress. I don't think that any of them are verse, chorus, verse, and so on. They are not simple.

With a lot of songs on this record, one verse doesn't relate to the next verse. I don't think that one day really relates to the next day in life.