Poetic Tone Quotes

Robert Frost: plain, strong, simple, and mean.

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'

The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.

I can't picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I'm making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.

Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce.

The interesting thing is that you don't often meet a poet who doesn't have a sense of humour, and some of them do keep it out of their poems because they're afraid of being seen as light versifiers.

By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow.

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.

The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.

Melancholy is ... the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.

I'll tell you how the Sun rose.

It is hard to compare cultures without overgeneralizing, but I think a lot of American poetry has an assertiveness - an upbeat quality - that's less typical of Canadian poetry. Of course there are poets in both countries to whom that generalization does not apply. Speaking broadly, I'd describe Canadians as being a bit more reserved than Americans. Not less opinionated - just less direct.

The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.