Quotes About Verse

Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.

Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or research of the writer.

A comic matter cannot be expressed in tragic verse. [Lat., Versibus exponi tragicis res comica non vult.]

Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

Yea, marry, now it is somewhat, for now it is rhyme; before, it was neither rhyme nor reason.

In poetry, only emotion endures.

Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.

Mr Witwould: "Pray, madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters? I find I must keep copies." Mrs Millamant: "Only with those in verse.... I never pin up my hair with prose."

Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.

Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins.

I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly.

I always did poetry, and [rap music is] pretty much hip-hop melody with poems.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.

The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

Sweet are the pleasures that to verse belong, And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song.

In sober mornings do not thou rehearse The holy incantation of a verse

I write, but I don't write poetry. I don't rhyme or anything like that.

In poetry, rhythm is a priority above everything else.

Why then we should drop into poetry.

... the radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely sensitive decapitated frog. It is hemisphereless poetry.

Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry.