L. E. Modesitt Jr. Quotes

All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.

My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

I like to write poetry.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

I am a poet, and I speak poetically.

I write... sonnets... and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

It's not easy to define poetry.

I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

After you kind of find your footing, sonnets are what comes easiest.

The crown of literature is poetry.

With lyrics, being a poet gave me a different approach than other people.

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

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.

Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.