Poetic Rhythm Quotes

In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches at the faculty club. In Russia it suggests the moral force of an art practiced against the greatest personal odds, as a discipline, solitary and intense.

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

Rhyme and meter force gaps in meaning so the muse can enter.

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.

I discover poetry when I was in elementary school and I was so fascinated by it. Because I realised if you get the right amount of syllables and the right amount of words, in the right rhyme scheme and you put it all together. You make words just bounce of a page.

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

An excellent habit to cultivate is the analytical study of the King James Bible. For simple yet rich and forceful English, this masterly production is hard to equal; and even though its Saxon vocabulary and poetic rhythm be unsuited to general composition, it is an invaluable model for writers on quaint or imaginative themes.

I write poetry. It comes naturally to me, but from a technical point of view it forces me to pay close attention to language and to scan.

I often write from memory by walking around and talking to myself. Even when I'm working at a computer I write out loud, so that I can hear the poem's rhythm.

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.

The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.

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

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

Black musicians were imitating speech cadences, and Kerouac was imitating the black musicians' breath cadences on their horns and brought it back to speech. It always was speech rhythms or cadences as far as the ear that Kerouac was developing. All passed through black music.

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

Merrily, merrily goes the bark On a breeze from the northward free, So shoots through the morning sky the lark, Or the swan through the summer sea.

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to. It's like trying to write a song, making tiny tweaks, reading it out loud, shifting things to make it sound a certain way... Sometimes it feels like digging out of a hole, but sometimes it feels like flying. When it's working and the rhythm's there, it does feel like magic to me.

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.

Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck.

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.

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.

There's a kind of ear music . . . a rhythmic synchronicity which creates a kind of heartbeat on the page.

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.