W. H. Auden Quotes

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

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

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.

Poetry stands or falls by its music.

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 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.

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

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

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.

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

I've spent so much time with iambic pentameter that I can now recognize it when I hear it in conversation or a movie - it's like a weird, useless superpower.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.

Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.

Anyone who holds a pen these days thinks he or she is a poet.

The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics.

I'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different set of antecedents.

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

Avarice is the miser's dream, as fame is the poet's.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem.

I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

Rhyme and meter force gaps in meaning so the muse can enter.