Ezra Pound Quotes

I think everything should be in verse. 'The New York Times' should be in verse.

Actually, I'm working on a book of poetry.

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

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

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

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

My own verse is usually free verse. The freer the better.

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

A poem is a flexible thing, and a poem is a poem.

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

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.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.

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.

If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.

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

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.

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

Form is endlessly interesting to me, and I love poetry as a formal enterprise.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

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.