Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

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.

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.

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

In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza.

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

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

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

I've spent so much time with iambic pentameter that I can now recognize it when I hear it in conversation or a movie - it's like a weird, useless superpower.

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

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.

Rhyme is a mnemonic device, an aid to the memory. And some poems are themselves mnemonics, that is to say, the whole purpose of the poem is to enable us to remember some information.

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

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

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

Generally speaking, rhyme is the marker for the end of a line. The first rhyme-word is like a challenge thrown down, which the poem itself has to respond to.

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.

The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.

When you're doing poetry like mine that rhymes, it's very easy to sound like a song that didn't work out!

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

I write poetry. It comes naturally to me, but from a technical point of view it forces me to pay close attention to language and to scan.

Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

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