Metre Quotes

The modern poet has no essential alliance with regular schemes of any sorts. He reserves the right to adapt his rhythm to his mood, to modulate his metre as he progresses. Far from seeking freedom and irresponsibility (implied by the unfortunate term free verse) he seeks a stricter discipline of exact concord of thought and feeling. (Herbert Read)
But metre itself implies a passion, i. e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet's mind, & is expected in that of the Reader. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I am not a multimillionaire. I dont own a yacht or a Ferrari. I live in a 60-square- metre flat. My needs are simple. View quote
Ferran Adria
The nobility... of the Argentine people, in this square and all the country's squares, causes us to offer our hand to the adversary, but this must not be taken as weak- ness. If it is necessary, the people, whose feelings I try to interpret as President of the nation, will be ready... to offer a hand, a gesture of peace with nobility and in a gesture of peace with honour, but they will also be ready to teach a lesson to anyone who dares to touch a square metre of Argentine territory. View quote
Leopoldo Galtieri
My objection to metre is that it enables people to write verse with no poetic inspiration. View quote
T. E. Hulme
She's beautiful,' he murmured. 'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia. 'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston. View quote
George Orwell
Gavin Douglas, set on a particular labour, with his mind full of Latin quantitative metre, attains a robuster versification than you are likely to find in Chaucer...the texture of Gavin's verse is stronger, the resilience greater. View quote
Gavin Douglas
Rhythm includes metre, but metre is a relatively small part of rhythm. View quote
Marjorie Boulton
Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most...are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so. View quote
James Fenton
The school of art which Hulme started and Pound established.. diction, rhythm and metre were fully emancipated from formal artifice and the poet was free to act creatively under the laws of his own origination. View quote
Herbert Read
Puskás scared the hell out of goalkeepers from the 30-35 metre range. He did not just have a powerful shot, but precision as well. I thought he was a genius. (Ferenc Puskás)
Craft is something you learn by studying models. When a student asks, what is a good book about traditional iambic verse, The Collected Poems of Ben Jonson. What is an excellent book about free verse? The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. What is a good book about short line in ballad metre? The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. View quote
Robert Pinsky
The precise reason why abstinence from animal food will be the first act ... of a moral life is admirably explained in the book, The Ethics of Diet [by Howard Williams]; and not by one man only, but by all mankind in the persons of its best representatives during all the conscious life of humanity. ... the moral progress of humanity - which is the foundation of every other kind of progress - is always slow; but ... the sign of true, not casual, progress is its uninterruptedness and its continual acceleration. And the progress of vegetarianism is of this kind. That progress, is expressed both in the words of the writers cited in the above-mentioned book and in the actual life of mankind, which from many causes is involuntarily passing metre and more from carnivorous habits to vegetable food, and is also deliberately following the same path in a movement which shows evident strength, and which is growing larger and larger - viz., vegetarianism. View quote
Leo Tolstoy
Socrates: The disgrace begins when a man writes not well, but badly. Phaedrus: Clearly. Socrates: And what is well and what is badly-need we ask Lysias, or any other poet or orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach us this? View quote
Plato
I used to be an athlete and even ran the 400 metre stretch for Tamil Nadu. I have always been active. View quote
Arjun Rampal
Shooting is very challenging because 10 metre air rifle you have different rules, short gun you have different rules. View quote
Gagan Narang
A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre. View quote
George Edward Woodberry
1500 metre. I am the king. View quote
Sun Yang
The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island. View quote
Derek Walcott
The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect successions of rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and Alexandrines. View quote
H. P. Lovecraft
The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the properties of versification and reason in its mad scramble after sensational novelty; whilst the other and quieter school constituting a more logical evolution from the poesy of the Georgian period, demands an accuracy of rhyme and metre unknown even to the polished artists of the age of Pope. (H. P. Lovecraft)
The foot, the pound, and the pint are all close to the size of many things used in daily life. In contrast, the metre, the kilogram, and the litre are all rather large, and the centimetre, the gram, and the millilitre rather small, for many practical uses. View quote
Thomas Flanagan (political scientist)
Here lies the peerless paper lord, Lord Peter, Who broke the laws of God and man, and metre. View quote
John Gibson Lockhart
[On David Cameron] When I heard this inherited multi-million ex-Etonian talking about a culture of entitlement, well, I'm sorry, but my irony meter went through the red and then exploded in a gale of bitter laughter. It actually went "HAA!" I was furious, because I've only just had a new irony metre installed after Rebekah Brooks complained about how she had been unfairly reported by the British press. View quote
Marcus Brigstocke
For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art. View quote
James Fenton