Metrical Pattern Quotes

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.

Emily Dickinson seems rather tame because she pretty much uses the same meter every time. It's called 'common meter.' It's a line of four beats that's followed by a line of three beats.

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.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

To break the pentameter, that was the first heave

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

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

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

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

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.

To me, a poem that's in rhyme and meter is the difference between watching a film in full color and watching a film in black and white. Not that a few black and white films aren't wonderful. So are certain successful pieces of free verse.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

All of Victorian verse is pentameter.

Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.

Scorn not the sonnet. Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.

When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.

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

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 form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.

The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.

Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck.

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

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.

There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.