William Empson Quotes

Metrics are not a device for restraining the mad, any more than 'open form' or free verse is a prairie where a man can do all kinds of manly things in a state of wholesome unrestrictedness.

I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

The long poem cannot be a digressive, expansive, boring exposition. It is really made of very sharp, Imagistic, quintessential poetic elements.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.

The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.

I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time.

In every good poem everything must be both deliberate and instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.

The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.

Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.

Poetry is very crafted. You can't have too many words. It needs compression. It has to be spare, just the right number of words.

In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.

A poet's interest in craft never fades, of course.

You don't take a picture, you make a picture.

I feel in poetry there aren't that many rules that you need to absolutely live by depending on your style of poetry.

The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of a photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.

In music industry they always want you to write something like the one that was popular. And that's something you kind of have to just - sometimes you just say yes to people, like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure," and then you just write the one you want to write.

I don't ... like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.'

I want to be in cahoots with bands who want to make the record of their dreams.

Most great art is freedom within form. Without form, we are amateurs, without freedom, we are robots.

You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.