T. S. Eliot Quotes

Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music.

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

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

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

Form is endlessly interesting to me, and I love poetry as a formal enterprise.

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

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

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

You want to know how to rhyme, then learn how to add. It's mathematics.

I was a little, uh, incorrigible as a kid, so the kitchen was a good place to give me structure and balance. It taught me hard work, but then I grew to love it.

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

I'd like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God's a workman. I don't think there's anything better than a workman.

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.

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

Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave.

My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.

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.

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.

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.

After you kind of find your footing, sonnets are what comes easiest.

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.