Top 42 Quotes About Free Verse
#1. I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.
John Barrymore
#2. I recently bought a book of free verse. For twelve dollars.
George Carlin
#4. The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
Donald Hall
#5. 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.
X.J. Kennedy
#6. Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
Robert Frost
#7. I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.
Robert Frost
#9. Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance.
Amy Lowell
#10. Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open to accusations of elitism, mandarinism. Open form was like common ground on which all might graze their cattle - it was not to be closed in by usurping landlords.
James Fenton
#11. The next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.
Annie Finch
#12. Metrics are not a device for restraining the mad, any more than 'open form' or free verse is a prairie where a man can do all kinds of manly things in a state of wholesome unrestrictedness.
James Fenton
#13. I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.
Jorge Luis Borges
#14. The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'
James Fenton
#15. 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.
Robert Morgan
#16. The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.
Felix Dennis
#17. 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.
Andrew Motion
#18. Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.
G.K. Chesterton
#19. I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.
Howard Nemerov
#20. Sanity is a sonnet with a strict meter and rhyme scheme-and my mind is free verse.
Holly Schindler
#21. "vers libre," (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture.
G.K. Chesterton
#22. 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.
Richard Aldington
#24. I started wanting desperately to say something, to make a point, to be heard - and I still feel that way. Free verse served me best when I embarked on poetry.
Denise Duhamel
#25. In the poetry of arrival, the garage door is free verse; the front door can be anything from a rhyming couplet to a sonnet.
Akiko Busch
#26. I like poetry because poetry - even in free verse - is formal, and it has to be very concise and packed and rich, and I like the feeling of having to do that, having to make the language tight and still free, as if the deepest freedom is created by the restrictions.
Pattiann Rogers
#27. If there has been one overriding change in poetic practice, it is that under the influence of free verse the poets have made a primary virtue out of exactitude and economy of meaning: this has replaced metrical skill as the first thing the poet tunes to.
Martin Langford
#29. Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.
James Fenton
#30. My own verse is usually free verse. The freer the better.
L. Ron Hubbard
#31. I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.
Howard Nemerov
#32. You should be more careful
when you move, my dear
what with you...
spilling moonlight
into my poem, with a mere
flick of your hand.
Sanober Khan
#33. Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins.
Dana Gioia
#34. in the end
it is words
poetry. sunsets
someone's deep blue
silk voice.
mountain scents.
someone's smile.
eyes. that we have
no defenses against.
Sanober Khan
#35. It is something to have gazed on the constellated white,
felt it running from the eyes and the pores: the salt of love.
It is something to have whispered wild thank-yous
in the only ways we know how.
Bryana Johnson
#36. By(e) pen, I've tried my hand at poetry; only to see how boring it is to me. That is, unless I get a chance to destroy each and every piece while doing it as I please.
Criss Jami
#37. I scratch down happiness, I
want my ink to do happy dances,
to careen across the pages staggering
like a drunken fellow, giddy
on moonshine or sunset.
Bryana Johnson
#38. The ocean-blue bowl won't
refuse to bruise, won't hold it back
from the gaping earth-wounds.
There will still come
water, chill wind and happy
goosebumps,
and in the utmost corners of oaks,
leaves laughing.
Bryana Johnson
#39. Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.
William Carlos Williams
#40. Scatter as a prayer
escaping my lips...
as orchids
blooming in clouds.
Sanober Khan
#41. It is not good form to take a Trick out unless one is so firmly established as to be able to afford being associated with someone who might at any given moment write a poem in public.
Fran Lebowitz
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