Susan B. Anthony Quotes

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

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

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

I first got caught up in this marvelous feeling of being spoken to in that very direct, private, magical way by a poem when I was really young. I was in grade school and had found an Emily Dickinson poem in a textbook.

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

The secret of understanding poetry is to hear poetry's words as what they are: the full self's most intimate speech, half waking, half dream. You listen to a poem as you might listen to someone you love who tells you their truest day. Their words might weep, joke, whirl, leap. What's unspoken in the words will still be heard. It's also the way we listen to music: You don't look for extractable meaning, but to be moved.

I think, for myself, as an artist, the progression is a lyrical progression and what I choose to target my lyrics at and how I construct the rhymes.

I don't like scaring people off. When I tell people I'm a writer, they look kind of interested. Then I tell them that I write poetry, and they think I'm weird.

When you're doing poetry like mine that rhymes, it's very easy to sound like a song that didn't work out!

'The Wizard of Poetry' - I had that title since I did 'The Pretty Toney' album. That's when the name first came to me.

To approach a poem as if it is a puzzle to be understood is to miss the point.

I was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.

I'm a lousy writer, and it shows when I try to write poetry.

It is very difficult to explain poetry. You have to understand the poetry and figure out your own take and your relatability.

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.

Assonance is not the enemy of rhyme. It helps us to respect rhyme, which has been spoiled by mechanical use.

The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre.