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
Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence. — Norman O. Brown
I think that things are poetic when they don't have a boundary. Without rules. My life is poetic. — Mark Gonzales
Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you. — Jim Morrison
Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique. — Karl Shapiro
If poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree,
then it better not come at all. — John Keats
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. — Jean Cocteau
I do not feel like writing verses; but as I light my perfume burner with myrrh and jasmine incense, they suddenly burgeon from my heart, like flowers in a garden. — Hafez
When I was from Cupid's passions free, my Muse was mute and wrote no elegy. — Ovid
Real poetry is a party, a wild party, a party where anything might happen. A party from which you may never return home. — Dorothea Lasky
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does. — Allen Ginsberg
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes. — Charles Baudelaire
Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. — James Tate
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Short Free Verse Quotes
A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men. — Thomas Carlyle
Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it. — Matsuo Basho
A poem is a frozen moment
melted by each reader for themselves
to flow into the here and now. — Hilde Domin
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. — Paul Ambroise Valery
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. — Paul Valery
The powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. — Walt Whitman
Poetry is life distilled. — Gwendolyn Brooks
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. — Edgar Allan Poe
I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. — Edward Abbey
The ocean is everything I want to be. Beautiful, mysterious, wild and free.
Verse Quotes
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds — Paul the Apostle
God is in control, and therefore in EVERYTHING I can give thanks - not because of the situation but because of the One who directs and rules over it. — Kay Arthur
Fools take the knife and stab people in the back. The wise take a knife, cut the cord and free themselves from the fools.
God's Word never fails. He will always heal you if you dare to believe Him. Men are searching everywhere today for things with which they can heal themselves, and they ignore the fact that the Balm of Gilead (Jeremiah 8:22) is within easy reach. — Smith Wigglesworth
Give me a flagon of red wine, a book of verses, a loaf of bread, and a little idleness. If with such store I might sit by thy dear side in some lonely place, I should deem myself happier than a king in his kingdom. — Omar Khayyam
It represents a Bible verse I wear on my shoe. Philippians 4:13. It says 'I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.' It's also my mantra, how I get up for games and why I play the way I do. — Stephen Curry
Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.
Three things differentiate living from the soul verses living from the ego only: the ability to sense and learn new ways, the tenacity to ride a rough road, and the patience to learn deep love over time. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart. — Paul the Apostle
Any artist that's as serious about making music as I am, I'm cool with that. But if you tellin' me, "Man, send me a verse and I'ma send you a verse." No. That's not collaborating. We don't know each other and I'm serous about this music. — Kevin Gates
Let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. — John the Apostle
An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault with everything. — Will Durant
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
It takes a huge effort to free yourself from memory.
I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free. — John Barrymore
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. — Robert Frost
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
You are free to choose, but you are not free from the consequence of your choice.
I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know. — Howard Nemerov
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
I switch between fixed forms and free verse often, and enjoy being a poet who can "swing both ways," so to speak. — Allison Joseph
Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle. — William Carlos Williams
I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down. — Robert Frost
Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks. — Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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
I've read The Satanic Verses and I thought it a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book... I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it. — Maurice Cowling
My own verse is usually free verse. The freer the better. — L. Ron Hubbard
There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.) And as I lay there, it occurred to me that God is up there somewhere. — Donald Miller
I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down. — Robert Frost
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
Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs. — Dorothy Allison
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
Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history. — John C. Ransom
Narrative nonfiction was not my forte. I always wanted to let my imagination run free, and the facts sometimes got in the way. At one point I wanted to illustrate Jack Prelutsky's enchanting poems. Unable to do that, I started devising and improvising my own poems, very raw at first. I immersed myself in verse, writing reams of stuff until it gelled. — Douglas Florian
If I can quote myself, I explained whatever it is I'm doing once for No Tell Motel, and I still think it's the clearest I've ever been about this: "I don't write free verse poems - mostly because I can't. But I am interested in the musical effects achievable with free verse." — Shane McCrae
I think there's a faith formula in that verse: believe plus receive equals become. So I think believing's important, having intellectual agreement with Christian doctrine is important, but there has to be a time when we receive God's gift of grace - not that we've earned it or merit it or deserve it - but receive this free gift of forgiveness and eternal life that Jesus purchased on the cross for us. — Lee Strobel
The problem has to be answered by means of art, because you can't blast them with bliss. Tat freaks them out even more. So instead, you have to have an artful way of approaching them. You do a dance for them, you get them to imagine being interconnected, and to imagine being free of their suffering, and not so self involved, through art that draws them out. Then you, and they, are all established in what's called a Buddha-verse, or Buddha-land — Robert Thurman
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
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
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
To later Romans Ennius was the personification of the spirit of early Rome; by them he was called "The Father of Roman Poetry." We must remember how truly Greek he was in his point of view. He set the example for later Latin poetry by writing the first epic of Rome in Greek hexameter verses instead of in the old Saturnian verse. He made popular the doctrines of Euhemerus, and he was in general a champion of free thought and rationalism. — Quintus Ennius
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
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
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
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
The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau. — Donald Hall
I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library-everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right. — Bob Dylan
I recently bought a book of free verse. For twelve dollars. — George Carlin
Free verse'? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise. — W. H. Auden
Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
In Conclusion
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