Free Verse Quotes

• I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort - I mean I didn't give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form - all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I've always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do.

  Conrad Aiken

  Mean, Writing, Exercise

  "Conrad Aiken, The Art of Poetry No. 9". Interview with Robert Hunter Wilbur in September 1963, "The Paris Review", www.theparisreview.org. Winter - Spring 1968.

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• Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

  Robert Frost

  Writing, Poetry, Tennis

  Address to Milton Academy, Milton, Mass., 17 May 1935

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• No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.

  Ezra Pound

  Jobs, Truth, Men

  Ezra Pound, Richard Sieburth (2010). “New Selected Poems and Translations”, p.362, New Directions Publishing

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• 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

  Memorable, Problem, Poetry Is

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• The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.

  W. H. Auden

  Dirty, Writing, Islands

  "The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays" by W. H. Auden, ("Writing"), (p. 22), 1962.

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• The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.

  Donald Hall

  Form, Binding, Verses

  Donald Hall (2004). “Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected”, p.34, University of Michigan Press

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• 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

  Feelings, Language, Rich

  Interview with Carolyn Perry and Wayne Zade, poems.com. 2009.

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• Free verse'? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Sleep, May, Architecture

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• 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

  Way, Heard, Feels

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Links, Lines, Break

  "Walking with Her Muse: An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim". Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 July 2014, Pages 123 - 135, academic.oup.com. June 22, 2013.

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• I recently bought a book of free verse. For twelve dollars.

  George Carlin

  Humorous, Book, Twelve

  George Carlin (2002). “Napalm & Silly Putty”, Hyperion

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

  Robert Frost

  Writing, Play, Poetry

  In Edward Lathem 'Interviews with Robert Frost' (1966) p. 203

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• The modern poet has no essential alliance with regular schemes of any sorts.He reserves the right to adapt his rhythm to his mood, to modulate his metre as he progresses. Far from seeking freedom and irresponsibility (implied by the unfortunate term free verse) he seeks a stricter discipline of exact concord of thought and feeling.

  Herbert Read

  Discipline, Feelings, Progress

  "Collected Essays in Literary Criticism". Book by Herbert Read, 1938.

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• Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.

  Dorothy Allison

  Teenager, Two, Legs

  Dorothy Allison, Mae Miller Claxton (2012). “Conversations with Dorothy Allison”, p.119, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• 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

  Might, Common, Accusation

  "Negative images" by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. November 15, 2002.

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• 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

  Art, Names, Quality

  "Negative images" by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. November 15, 2002.

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• 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

  Writing, Way, Modern

  "Ode to a right royal charmer". Interview With Euan Ferguson, www.theguardian.com. July 23, 2000.

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• 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

  Writing, Stories, Patterns

  Jorge Luis Borges (1998). “Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations”, p.76, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

  Howard Nemerov

  Clear, Verses, Knows

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• 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

  Memories, Voice, Aftermath

  "Where poetry and music divide" by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. June 21, 2002.

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

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Free Love, Contradiction, Term

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• I switch between fixed forms and free verse often, and enjoy being a poet who can "swing both ways," so to speak.

  Allison Joseph

  Swings, Way, Speak

  Source: blog.pshares.org

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• So many people's school experience contains at least one instance of being looked down upon because they didn't care for one or more of the sacred mutant outcroppings of High Modernism, and they concluded from this that Literature is all about impenetrable stuff that they don't like. That damn Hemingway with his crazy free verse.

  Patrick Nielsen Hayden

  Crazy, School, People

  "Oh No Lev Grossman No". nielsenhayden.com. August 30, 2009.

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• Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most... are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so.

  James Fenton

  Regret, Believe, Reading

  "An Introduction to English Poetry". Book by James Fenton, 2002.

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• 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

  Writing, Pieces, Kind

  "Collected Poems". Book by Richard Aldington, Introduction, 1929.

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