Verses Quotes - Page 5

• A comic matter cannot be expressed in tragic verse.
  [Lat., Versibus exponi tragicis res comica non vult.]

  Horace

  Poetry, Matter, Comic

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• Harmony of period and melody of style have greater weight than is generally imagined in the judgment we pass upon writing and writers. As a proof of this, let us reflect what texts of scripture, what lines in poetry, or what periods we most remember and quote, either in verse or prose, and we shall find them to be only musical ones.

  William Shenstone

  Writing, Musical, Style

  William Shenstone, Samuel Johnson, Robert Dodsley (1807). “Essays on men and manners; with aphorisms, criticisms, impromptus, fragments, etc”, p.116

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• Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer Said once about the long toil that goes like blood to the poems making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls, Limp as bindweed, if it break at all Life's iron crust Man, you must sweat And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build Your verse a ladder.

  R. S. Thomas

  Men, Blood, Sweat

  R.S. Thomas (2012). “Collected Poems: 1945-1990 R.S.Thomas: Collected Poems : R S Thomas”, p.85, Hachette UK

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• Verse should be as natural As the small tuber that feeds on muck And grows slowly from obtuse soil To the white flower of immortal beauty

  R. S. Thomas

  Flower, White, Soil

  R. S. Thomas, “Poetry For Supper”

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• Leave not a foot of verse, a foot of stone, A Page, a Grave, that they can call their own; But spread, my sons, your glory thin or thick, On passive paper, or on solid brick.

  Alexander Pope

  Son, Feet, Paper

  1742 The Dunciad, bk.4, l.127-30.

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• n artistic atmosphere does not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators; poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a picture seen. This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the instruments and means of beauty.

  William Dean Howells

  Spring, Mean, Artist

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• Though my verse but roam the air And murmur in the trees, You may discern a purpose there, As in music of the bees.

  Alfred Austin

  Air, Poetry, Tree

  Alfred Austin (1885). “At the Gate of the Convent: And Other Poems”

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• No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

  Alfred Austin

  Quality, May, Obscure

  "The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry". Book by Alfred Austin, 1910.

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• 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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• Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.

  Jonathan Swift

  Shining, Fiction, Poet

  Jonathan Swift (1860). “The Works of Jonathan Swift ...: With Copious Notes and Additions, and a Memoir of the Author”, p.430

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• Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse -- there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Reading, Waiting, Next

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• The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

  Thomas Gray

  Support, Age, Doe

  Letter to West, 8 April 1742, in H. W. Starr (ed.) 'Correspondence of Thomas Gray' (1971) vol. 1, letter 103

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• How fast we learn in the day of sorrow! Scripture shines out in a new effulgence; every verse seems to contain a sunbeam, every promise stands out in illuminated splendor; things hard to be understood become in a moment plain.

  Horatius Bonar

  Shining, Promise, Sorrow

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 555), 1895.

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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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• Oh to be my verse an answering gleam from higher radiance caught

  Frances Ridley Havergal

  Radiance, Gleam, Caught

  Frances Ridley Havergal (1872). “The Ministry of Song”, p.1

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• He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. - Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton

  Bill Vaughan

  Writing, Firsts, Temples

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• I wouldn't say I'm a very controlling person. For instance, when I talk to the actors, I don't tell them exactly what I want because I want them to surprise me. I even encourage them to change some of the verses of the script if they need to.

  Alejandro Amenabar

  Change, Needs, Actors

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• Yes, the work comes out more beautiful from a material that resists the process, verse, marble, onyx, or enamel.

  Theophile Gautier

  Beautiful, Process, Materials

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• Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.

  Northrop Frye

  Long, Jupiter, Literature

  Northrop Frye, Germaine Warkentin (2006). “Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962”, p.447, University of Toronto Press

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• Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

  Eugenio Montale

  Today, Prose

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• There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

  Eugenio Montale

  Writing, Connections, Poet

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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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• 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.

  James Fenton

  Hymns, Practice, Four

  "Changing rooms" by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. September 6, 2002.

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• I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs.

  Jackson Browne

  Song, Writing, Add

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• I wrote my own verses. Anything I did, I wrote myself.

  Brandy Norwood

  My Own

  "Brandy thanks Timbaland for endorsing her new rap career" by Shaheem Reid, www.mtv.com. December 9, 2009.

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