Lascelles Abercrombie Quotes

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.

When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.

The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

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.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

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

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

I love form, but I'm not interested in forms. I've never written a sonnet or villanelle or sestina or any of that. For me, it's a kind of line. It's a rhythm. It's something musical.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

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.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.