Quotes About Free Verse Poetry

#1. 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

#2. I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

Robert Frost

#3. Teaching children about the natural world should be seen as one of the most important events in their lives.

Thomas Berry

#4. For months I've been working on creating techniques to reproduce Swarovski crystals in sugar using the real stones to guide me.

Ron Ben-Israel

#5. I like to stay home with my family.

Mads Mikkelsen

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. What makes you so certain?"
"But I am not certain," I told him. "Nothing is certain. You want certainty?"
"Yes!"
"Then you want death.

Stephen R. Lawhead

#13. There are a lot of similarities with film and TV, but also a lot of differences, especially in the way they film stuff.

Robbie Kay

#14. She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater mystery, woman.

Victor Hugo

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. Surprisingly now, over a half a century later, time symmetric approaches to electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, gravity, and cosmology might be consonant with the kind of eschatology that a theist such as Pannenberg supports.

Robert John Russell

#25. The quality of your life is dependent upon the quality of the life of your cells. If the bloodstream is filled with waste products, the resulting environment does not promote a strong, vibrant, healthy cell life-nor a biochemistry capable of creating a balanced emotional life for an individual.

Tony Robbins

#26. "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

#27. Doing something for Victoria's Secret would be great - I love Doutzen Kroes. She's so special to look at but seems like a very normal person. She's true to herself - that's important to me.

Ymre Stiekema

#28. Scatter as a prayer
escaping my lips...

as orchids
blooming in clouds.

Sanober Khan

#29. 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

#30. I am bothered by poems I don't understand.

Joyce Rachelle

#31. Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.

G.K. Chesterton

#32. If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.

Samuel Butler