Kenneth Rexroth Quotes

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.

The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

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

I love form, but I'm not interested in forms. I've never written a sonnet or villanelle or sestina or any of that. For me, it's a kind of line. It's a rhythm. It's something musical.

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.

The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics.

Trochee trips from long to short; From long to long in solemn sort Slow Spondee stalks.

We do inherently know that poetry is about the way we speak. It's about where we pause, where we drop our words in the middle of a sentence. It's about the rhythm and the cadence of the way we speak. It's about putting that down at the end of the day.

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

The Italian word 'stanza' means 'a room', and a room is a good way to conceive of a stanza. A room, generally speaking, is sufficient for its own purposes, but it does not constitute a house. A stanza has the same sense of containment, without being complete or independent.

I teach writing courses and first of all, I teach my students what prosody is.

I read mostly poetry.

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.

Take a simple name like Nicholas: you can rhyme it with ridiculous. If you aren't too meticulous. You know, every word's rhymable.

I've spent so much time with iambic pentameter that I can now recognize it when I hear it in conversation or a movie - it's like a weird, useless superpower.

Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results in all cases. And the poem, if it's written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed.

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.

Many varieties of sonnet, of course, have been written over the ages.

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

I'm only interested in poetry.

Verse is a set of specially related sounds, repeated aloud.