T. S. Eliot Quotes

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

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it - the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it.

The main thing a poem ought to be is musical. It should be rhythmic. You should hear it as a musical piece in your head as you're writing it.

The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics.

Music is the unspoken language that can convey feelings more accurately than talking ever could.

The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.

To understand Vers libre, one must abandon all desire to find in it the even rhythm of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader.

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

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

The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.

Well-written words are music.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

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.

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

The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.

There is a musical rhythm to great writing, especially if it's performed correctly.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

In a certain way, it's the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.