It was the enchantment of spoken verse that led me to write for children.
Verse
The basic line in any good verse is cadenced… building it around the natural breath structures of speech.
The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.
Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.
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.
I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That’s one of the things you learn not to know.
First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.
No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.