Quotes & Sayings About Free Verse

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

Dead Butterfly
By Ellen Bass
For months my daughter carried
a dead monarch in a quart mason jar.
To and from school in her backpack,
to her only friend's house. At the dinner table
it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast.
She took it to bed, propped by her pillow.
Was it the year her brother was born?
Was this her own too-fragile baby
that had lived - so briefly - in its glassed world?
Or the year she refused to go to her father's house?
Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there?
This plump child in her rolled-down socks
I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me
and carry safe again. What was her fierce
commitment? I never understood.
We just lived with the dead winged thing
as part of her, as part of us,
weightless in its heavy jar. — Ellen Bass

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

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

To a Poet"

Let verse of yours be flexible, but strong,
Strong as a poplar under valley's cover,
Strong as the earth under a plough, long,
Strong as a girl, who never knew a lover.

Reliably preserve severity at length,
Your verse need not be fluttering or booming,
Although the Muse has very easy steps,
She's not a dancer, but a goddess, ruling.

Frolicsome din of interrupted rhymes --
Temptation for decline, so free and so easy --
Just leave for use by jokers in a dance
On city streets for people who aren't busy.

And going out on the sacred paths,
Bring to melodiousness your chosen damnation.
You know, she's a mistress of the mass,
She craves embraces, as a dearth -- donations. — Nikolay Gumilev

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs. — Dorothy Allison

My own verse is usually free verse. The freer the better. — L. Ron Hubbard

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

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

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

Speaking from experince, there are people who have too much space between their ears, and given the time, do nothing but free fall forever inside their heads. It's a spooky thing to be left alone inside an angry inner-verse.
Drugs redirect the fall. They cushion it. Give you a parachute. Or maybe just a flashlight and scuba gear. I don't know how you look at the inside of your head
what metaphor you choose
but for those of us with endless yawning stretches of interior and nothing but nothing to stop us from getting lost in it, drugs can be wonderfully helpful.
For a time. — James St. James

The Universal Turtle Verse
I spend the day nibbling rent-free
Underneath the Giving Tree.
Me, Rirty Dat and Snerry Jake
Show Runny Babbit how to make
Up verses. Then I lug my hump
(Careful not to bump the Glump)
Into the woods to trade a word
With the argle-bargle bird:
Nuthatch wisely recommends,
Find out where the sidewalk ends. — J. Patrick Lewis

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

The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau. — Donald Hall

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

Looking back on my life, I'd say I am grateful to my two sons for having brought me up. It could not have been easy - for them or for their father. For me it was a "Poetry Workshop," a way of doing poetry by another means (in no sense a continuation of Iowa) - as well as the sort of upbringing I never got from my mother.

As luck would have it, I had a poet, a classical poet, for a mother. She didn't write free verse; she wrote poetry until the last years of her life in the classical Chinese style. So a lot of work was done for me - when you imbibe Tang and Sung poets with a mother who chanted verses on the balcony in the moonlight. — Wong May

A midst deceit I found the truth;
there in the rough I found a diamond.
And from the moment we met,
I think of no one else
Today I choose to be, to live and breathe;
to dream, to weep, and to sing in free verse.
And you, the object of my delight:
a like-minded opposite I am myself with,
a mind-fuck times six, seven, eight thousand and three.
I know that you love me with every inch of your deep. — Donato DiCristino

Theophilus Crowe wrote bad free-verse poetry and played a jimbai drum while sitting on a rock by the ocean. He could play sixteen chords on the guitar and knew five Bob Dylan songs all the way through, allowing for a dampening buzz any time he had to play a bar chord. He had tried his hand at painting, sculpture, and pottery and had even played a minor part in the Pine Cove Little Theater's revival of Arsenic and Old Lace. In all of these endeavors, he had experienced a meteoric rise to mediocrity and quit before total embarrassment and self-loathing set in. Theo was cursed with an artist's soul but no talent. He possessed the angst and the inspiration, but not the means to create. — Christopher Moore

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

I am a poet
writing frenetic free verse
I am pretentious — Michael H. Hanson

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

Have you ever
had so much to say
that your mouth closed up tight
struggling to harness
the nuclear force
coalescing within your words?
Have you ever
had so many thoughts
churning inside you that you didn't
dare let them escape
in case they blew you wide open?
Have you ever
been so angry that you
couldn't look in the mirror
for fear of finding the face of evil
glaring back at you? — Ellen Hopkins

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 am bothered by poems I don't understand. — Joyce Rachelle

Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history. — John Crowe Ransom

Free verse'? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

To be lord of space, a man must be free of all bonds to place. To be heir of all things, his heart must have no THINGS in it. He must be like him who makes things, not like one who would put everything in his pocket. He must stand on the upper, not the lower side of them. He must be as the man who makes poems, not the man who gathers books of verse. God, having made a sunset, lets it pass, and makes such a sunset no more. He has no picture-gallery, no library. What if in heaven men shall be so busy growing, that they have not time to write or to read! — George MacDonald

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

If he's a poet, why's he in jail?" demanded a suspicious voice.
Madam Chairwoman shrugged velvet shoulders.
"Perhaps he writes free verse," she suggested cunningly.
A stir of approval answered her. Mice are all for people being free, so that they too can be freed form their eternal task of cheering prisoners--so that they can stay snug at home, nibbling the family cheese, instead of sleeping out in damp straw on a diet of stale bread. — Margery Sharp

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

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

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free. — John Barrymore

Angela had never really got on with modern poetry. Even stuff like Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist and the other book. He seemed such a lovely man and she really did try, but it sounded like prose you had to read very slowly. Old stuff she understood. Rum-ti-tum. Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white ... Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack ... Something going all the way back. Memorable words, so you could hand it down the generations. But free verse made her think of free knitting or free juggling. This, for example. She extracted a book at random. Spiders by Stanimir Stoilov, translated by Luke Kennard. She flipped through the pages ... the hatcheries of the moon ... the earth in my father's mouth. — Mark Haddon

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

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

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

Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle. — William Carlos Williams

What exactly is the new verse movement? The New Verse Movement of the 1910's was to make poetry relevant again by immersing it into the spaces, technologies, and social dynamics of the modern city.
And Now In The Present And Future ?
The New Verse Movement of the 21st Century follows these same beliefs. To somehow ignite the spark and to help make poetry relevant again in a new age of technologies (The Internet) and to support new & experimental as well as older poetic forms. The New Verse Movement of the 21st Century is all about change and free expression of the creative mind. — R.M. Engelhardt

Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms. — G.K. Chesterton

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. — Robert Frost

I recently bought a book of free verse. For twelve dollars. — George Carlin

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

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

If I was building any new kind of life to live, it really didn't seem that way. It's not as if I had turned in any old one to live it. If anything, 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

The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it. — Felix Dennis

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

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

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

Hamlet promised himself he'd throw down afterward, but I think perhaps when he said, "From this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!" the limits of blank verse weakened his resolve somehow. If he'd been free to follow the dictates of his conscience rather than the pen of Shakespeare, perhaps he would have abandoned verse altogether, like me, and contented himself with this instead: "Bring it, muthafuckas. Bring it. — Kevin Hearne

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

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

Sanity is a sonnet with a strict meter and rhyme scheme-and my mind is free verse. — Holly Schindler

In Isaiah 54:17 the Holy Spirit says, "No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against you in judgment you shall condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is of me, saith the Lord."
It's clear in this verse why no weapon that forms against us will prosper. It's because of the righteousness of the Lord! Christ's righteousness has been imputed unto us by grace through faith. The Holy Spirit calls this our heritage. Praise God! Truly, whom the Son sets free, is free indeed! The enemy cannot condemn you if you are established in Christ's righteousness. — Brian Williams

Just as in the second part of a verse bad poets seek a thought to fit their rhyme, so in the second half of their lives people tend to become more anxious about finding actions, positions, relationships that fit those of their earlier lives, so that everything harmonizes quite well on the surface: but their lives are no longer ruled by a strong thought, and instead, in its place, comes the intention of finding a rhyme. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

"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

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

Scatter as a prayer
escaping my lips...

as orchids
blooming in clouds. — Sanober Khan

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