Thomas Lynch Quotes

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

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.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music.

I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting.

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.

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

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.

My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.

I like to write poetry.

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.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

I love to write poetry.

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.

To break the pentameter, that was the first heave

In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

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

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath.

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.

Take a simple name like Nicholas: you can rhyme it with ridiculous. If you aren't too meticulous. You know, every word's rhymable.

You have to learn a few things, which you do along the way, but basically, poetry is a matter of the ear. Iambic pentameters or what constitutes a stanza comes naturally - your ears will know.

Many varieties of sonnet, of course, have been written over the ages.

It's really hard to find a lot of things that rhyme with Michael Diamond.