Verse Quotes

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. (Robert Frost)
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. View quote
John Updike
All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose. View quote
Molière
A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered. View quote
Lee Strasberg
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me. View quote
Anna Quindlen
The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech. View quote
Kenneth Rexroth
Let's be off before he gets his great horsey teeth into my poor lines of verse! View quote
Cornelia Funke
My first name - I have no middle name - was chosen by my father, as he told me, on that solitary walk in the forested hills. He selected it from a verse of the seventh chapter of Isaiah; there was no Immanuel among our ancestors known to him. View quote
Immanuel Velikovsky
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. View quote
Robert Morgan
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
With living colours give my verse to glow: The sad memorial of a tale of woe! (William Falconer)
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone. View quote
Thomas Hardy
I recently bought a book of free verse. For twelve dollars. View quote
George Carlin
Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle. View quote
William Carlos Williams
Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountains start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise. View quote
W. H. Auden
The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor. View quote
W. H. Auden
Railing in other men may be a crime, But ought to pass for mere instinct in him: Instinct he follows and no further knows, For to write verse with him is to transpose. View quote
John Dryden
There is not less wit nor invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought. Cardinal du Perron has been heard to say that the happy application of a verse of Virgil has deserved a talent. View quote
Pierre Bayle
What's the earth With all its art, verse, music, worth - Compared with love, found, gained, and kept? View quote
Robert Browning
Thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised) Linking our England to his Italy. View quote
Robert Browning
Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind. (George Santayana)
To write a verse or two is all the praise That I can raise. View quote
George Herbert
A verse may finde him,who a sermon flies And turns delight into a sacrifice. View quote
George Herbert
I thinke it not amisse to forewarne you that you thrust as few wordes of many sillables into your verse as may be: and hereunto I might alledge many reasons: first the most auncient English wordes are of one sillable, so that the more monasyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seeme, and the lesse you shall smell of the Inkehorne. View quote
George Gascoigne
In Phebus realm, in knowledge as in verse, All things are clear, the sun of Phoebus clear, Clear was his crystal, the Kastalian. What you cannot clearly say, you don't know: To tongue of man his thought brings word: What's said obscurely is what's thought obscurely. View quote
Esaias Tegnér