Louis MacNeice Quotes

Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results in all cases. And the poem, if it's written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.

There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness.

No poet is required to write in stanzas, or indeed in regular forms at all. Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode' has a rhyme scheme and sequence of long and short lines that goes without regular pattern, following the mood and whim of the poet. Such a form is known as an irregular ode.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music.

Shakespeare is rhythmic; he is musical in the sense that he likes poetry, and he's musical because he constantly refers to settings where there's singing and dancing.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.

Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.

I think rap music is rap music. I mean, are there heavy writing aspects of it? Absolutely. In a sense, is it poetry? Yeah. I've heard that so much, growing up in a house with poetry. But I think people like to use that as a shortcut for who's good and who's not. It's like the word 'lyrical' - 'lyrical' is the worst word in the entire world.

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

Lyrics need to be good, but they don't need to be obvious right away.

I like Fisher Price music, nursery rhymes, and the alphabet song.

I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.

The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.

I keep reminding people that an editorial in rhyme is not a song. A good song makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it makes you think.

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

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.

Being able to say something lyrically, to say something that will do more than just be words, is really hard. It's easy to do when you're writing a chapter of a book or writing poetry, but it's really hard to do when you're confined to a melody line.

When it comes to writers and poets, for me it's Vinicius de Moraes. He's one of the greatest lyricists ever.

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

Alice Oswald. With Hughes and Heaney gone, people are looking around for the best British and Irish poets. Oswald is one of our finest.