Verses Quotes - Page 9

• Verses devoid of substance, melodious trifles.
  [Lat., Versus inopes rerum, nugaeque canorae.]

  Horace

  Poetry, Substance, Trifles

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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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• Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or research of the writer.

  John Constable

  Art, Poetry, Understanding

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• Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless, of course, they are about sex.

  N. T. Wright

  Sex, Two, Three

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• [Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; ... Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, ... as have also long since our best English tragedies, as... trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.

  John Milton

  Italian, Numbers, Long

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• Sweet are the pleasures that to verse belong,
  And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song.

  John Keats

  Song, Sweet, Poetry

  'To George Felton Mathew' (1817) l. 1

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• Women are not apt to be won by the charms of verse.

  Bayard Taylor

  Charm, Wooing

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• As a rapper, your verses are like a window in to who you are.

  Andre Benjamin

  Rapper, Window, Who You Are

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• A translation in verse . . . seems to me something absurd, impossible.

  Victor Hugo

  Impossible, Absurd, Translations

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• I don't quite recollect how many tumblers of whiskey toddy each man drank after supper; but this I know, that about one o'clock in the morning, the baillie's grown-up son became insensible while attempting the first verse of 'Willie brewed a peck o' maut'; and he having been, for half an hour before, the only other man visible above the mahogany, it occurred to my uncle that it was almost time to think about going.

  Charles Dickens

  Funny, Morning, Uncles

  Charles Dickens (2016). “The Pickwick Papers: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”, p.554, Pan Macmillan

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• 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

  Art, Apology, Poetry

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• Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

  Paul Valery

  Art, Poetry, Fruit

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• The immediate success of the war poem anthologies ... proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse ... There has never before, in the world's history, been an epoch which has tolerated and even welcomed such a flood of verse as has been poured forth over Great Britain during the last three years.

  Edmund Gosse

  War, Years, Poetry

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• A verse may find him, who a sermon flies,
  And turn delight into a sacrifice.

  George Herbert

  Sacrifice, Delight, May

  "The Temple. Sacred poems and private ejaculations, etc".

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• On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of.... I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach.

  A. E. Housman

  Drinking, Beer, Two

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• What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophical, Thoughtful, Thinking

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (2012). “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks”, p.44, Regnery Publishing

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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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• Dante Alighieri is a universal poet, and great creators, they are writing for everybody always. Every single verse is very moving, and the beauty - if we don't understand, we just stay listening to the sound and it's like hearing music.

  Roberto Benigni

  Moving, Writing, Listening

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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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• What judgment I had increases rather than diminishes; and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or reject; to run them into verse or to give them the other harmony of prose.

  John Dryden

  Running, Giving, Judgment

  'Fables Ancient and Modern' (1700) preface

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• I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York-the Blessed Sacrament... I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion.

  Dorothy Parker

  Hilarious, New York, Children

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