Free Verse Quotes

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

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.

Dark hair fell in a sweep over his forehead. He looked like a man who would write vers libre, as indeed he did.

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

I write, but I don't write poetry. I don't rhyme or anything like that.

I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.

I'm really into poetry.

I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.

All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.

I never really read Allen Ginsberg poetry, even though I have a book he gave me.

Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance.

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

I think Allen [Ginsberg] was a person who's like a child.

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

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

My favorite rhymes are sort of half-rhymes where you might just get the vowel sound the same, but it's not really a true rhyme. That gives you far more flexibility to capture the feeling you're trying to express. But sometimes it's best not to have any rhyme.

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.

Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins.

I'm a poet.

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

Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.

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.

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

To me, a poem that's in rhyme and meter is the difference between watching a film in full color and watching a film in black and white. Not that a few black and white films aren't wonderful. So are certain successful pieces of free verse.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.