John Crowe Ransom Quotes

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

My own verse is usually free verse. The freer the better.

On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

All poetry is experimental poetry.

I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject.

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

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.

Well, it's a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.

In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

I don't like to box myself in when I'm composing.

Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.

Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement.

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.

In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.

Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising.

One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.