May Sarton Quotes

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

Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.

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.

Poetry stands or falls by its music.

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.

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

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

Rhythm and sounds are born with syllables.

I do think that all of us think in poems.

The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.

Poetry is composing for the breath.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

I really came to literature through poetry.

Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'

Well-written words are music.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Lyricists play with words.

Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression - these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.

Music is the soul of language.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

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

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

The best way to express rhythm is music.