Ian Doescher Quotes

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

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

Emily Dickinson seems rather tame because she pretty much uses the same meter every time. It's called 'common meter.' It's a line of four beats that's followed by a line of three beats.

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

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.

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

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

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

There is a formal poetry perfect only in form?the number of syllables, the designated and required stresses of accent, the rhymes if wantedthey come off with the skill of a solved crossword puzzle.

Trochee trips from long to short; From long to long in solemn sort Slow Spondee stalks.

In my opinion, it is easier to avoid iambic rhythms, when writing in syllabics, if you create a line or pattern of lines using odd numbers of syllables.

The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

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.

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

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.

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.

A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.

Many varieties of sonnet, of course, have been written over the ages.

If Obama was a sonnet, Trump is a limerick. And really, which ones do you enjoy more?

Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.

I think my love for rhythm in language comes from repeating the same words, the same sounds, over and over again day after day for so many years.