Verse Quotes

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.

Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

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.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

I couldn't believe verse was supposed to be hard. It was a snap for me. I loved Shakespeare.

I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs.

All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.

And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.

The clear French landscape is as pure as a verse of Racine.

Verse, singing, and speech have a common origin.

Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them.

I think everything should be in verse. 'The New York Times' should be in verse.

I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

Verse satire indeed is entirely our own.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

I don't mind a repetitive chorus; I mind repetitive verse. I mean, it's the same amount of space. Why would you have only three diamonds if you can have six?

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

The earliest form in which romances appear is that of a rude kind of verse.

The record Clef and I did was just sitting there. So I said, Clef, I got a record, hit a verse on it. He just went in, messed around and ended up doing the hook too.

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

Sometimes I'll have sections that I'm not quite sure how they fit in the puzzle of a tune, they'll get moved around; what I think was originally a verse ends up becoming the chorus, or what's an intro gets dropped as a hook, things get shifted around a lot.