Poetic Device Quotes

We were always scientifical in our raps.

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another . . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

I love metaphor the way some people love junk food.

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard.

Roses at first were white, Till thy co'd not agree, Whether my Sapho's breast, Or they more white sho'd be.

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?

Metaphor impinges on everything, allowing us - poets and non-poets alike - to experience and think about the world in fluid, unusual ways.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme.

People think that direct address was invented by Ferris Bueller, but in fact, it wasn't. It was invented by Shakespeare.

A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.

I often write about the moon, and more often than not, it is to symbolise a person, or a quality.

The word "down," is very musical. It just always comes.

Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem... some strategy in order to pave the reader's way to the impact of this or that line.

But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung.

Megaphone in which the wind passes singing.

This is what rhyme does. In a couplet, the first rhyme is like a question to which the second rhyme is an answer. The first rhyme leaves something in the air, some unanswered business. In most quatrains, space is created between the rhyme that poses the question and the rhyme that gives the answer - it is like a pleasure deferred.

The natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Rhyme is a mnemonic device, an aid to the memory. And some poems are themselves mnemonics, that is to say, the whole purpose of the poem is to enable us to remember some information.

The thing about metaphors is that, if you give them away, you give away the mystery.