Poetic Balance Quotes

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

A line has to have a certain number of syllables, and the next line has to be its mirror image.

If a conclusion is not poetically balanced, it cannot be scientifically true.

I don't like poetry that doesn't give me a sense of ritual, but I don't like poetry that doesn't sound like people talking to each other. I try to do both at once.

Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.

In every good poem everything must be both deliberate and instinctive. That is how the poem becomes ideal.

Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal - and these balances are shifting all the time.

...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it is the musical value that tends to disappear - so that verse stands symmetrically, as it were, between song, on the one hand, and prose on the other - and is thus admirably and delicately balanced between the sensual and the intellectual power of language.

Sometimes, I think the best kind of poem is one in which there is an acute balance between what is humorous and that which is very serious. That balance is very hard to strike. But it can be done.

Happy who in his verse can gently steer, From grave to light, from pleasant to severe.

She stood upon a continent of ice, which sparkled between sea and sky, endless and dazzling, as though the world kept all its treasure there; a scale which balanced poetry and prayer.

If you've got a verse with a lot of rhythm, you want to pair it with something that doesn't.

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.

I love my funny poems, but I'd rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that's the best.