Henry Austin Dobson Quotes

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza.

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

I feel that I'm a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it's the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.