Iambic Quotes

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier. (Howard Nemerov)

It's good to have a lot of once-in-a-lifetimes in your lifetime. If you get the chance to skydive, go skydiving. If you're offered a part in a weird Shakespeare play in San Diego, slap on some tights and rock out some iambic pentameter.

Neil Patrick Harris

Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story.

Marshall McLuhan

Just breathe at the end of the line or on the punctuation. If you lose that, and lose the iambic pentameter, you'll lose all the sense of what you're saying. And if you do breathe, you'll find that Shakespeare's verse is like a surfboard.

Orson Welles

If the English version is in what, in our youth, we used to speak of affectionately as dear old iambic pentameter, the actors mercifully abstain from reciting it that way; they speak their lines as good, hardy prose.

Dorothy Parker

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.

Robert Pinsky

I think what holds a poem like this together for me, if it's held together, is largely meter; this one is in iambic pentameter and iambic pentameter whatever else it is, can be a very good glue. It is a very good way to hold things together. It's like 4:4 you know.

Robert Pinsky

With Shakespeare, if you're not going to do the iambic pentameter, do some other play.

John C. McGinley

BLANK-VERSE, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters the most difficult kind of English verse to write acceptably a kind, therefore, much affected by those who cannot acceptably write any kind.

Ambrose Bierce

Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recap.

David Ogilvy

You have to learn a few things, which you do along the way, but basically, poetry is a matter of the ear. Iambic pentameters or what constitutes a stanza comes naturally - your ears will know. (Vikram Seth)

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.

Robert Pinsky

You know, I used to say, when people say, 'How do you think about what to write about in the poems every week?' And I say, 'Well, I have to turn it in on Monday, so on Sunday nights I turn the shower to iambic pentameter and it sort of works out that way.'

Calvin Trillin