Amy Lowell Quotes

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

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

The main thing a poem ought to be is musical. It should be rhythmic. You should hear it as a musical piece in your head as you're writing it.

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.

I began to write what I called 'rhythms' ie unrhymed pieces with no formal metrical scheme where the rhythm was created by a kind if inner chant... Later I was told I was writing 'free verse' or Vers libre.

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

At somewhere around 10 syllables, the English poetic line is at its most relaxed and manageable.

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

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.

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

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.

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 iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

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.

Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

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.

When you're doing poetry like mine that rhymes, it's very easy to sound like a song that didn't work out!

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.

In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches at the faculty club. In Russia it suggests the moral force of an art practiced against the greatest personal odds, as a discipline, solitary and intense.

My own verse is usually free verse. The freer the better.