Rhythmic Language Quotes

Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.

I was really drawn to spoken-word style poetry. I loved the rhythms, and for some reason, I was just drawn to this poetry as a way of expressing my feelings, because I didn't have any other outlet.

I definitely have a gift for language that is rhythmic and attractive to the ear, and I have interesting [verbal] imagery which I guess is a poetic touch.

Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.

Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

Words on a page can hypnotize you if the rhythm is right

If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.

Poetry is music written for the human voice.

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Poetry is a form of necessary speech... I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements of poetry.

The best argument for teaching poetry is to put a three-year-old or a four-year-old and read Dr. Seuss, or Robert Louis Stevenson, and to feel how the child and you are engaging in something that's really basic to the animal, which is passing on in these rhythmic ways, something that came from somewhere.

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country. It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world.

Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.

For the very young, there's nothing better than Mother Goose and anything by Dr. Seuss for the rhythms and language.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

Playing with words is like combining different notes in music.

Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.

Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

I adored being at the RSC and working on the verse and getting the iambic pentameter right. You just skim across the surface, and the speech is over before you know it. You can just ride along on the music of it.

Well-written words are music.

Sir, what is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.