Characteristic Quote by James Fenton

The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech…

— Edward Hirsch

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…

— James Fenton

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the…

— James Fenton

For me, the measure of a poem is the word, not the line.

— John Kinsella

“Can there really be a form of verse where all that counts is the number of syllables in a line? No patterning of stress…

— Stephen Fry

So for whatever reason those short lines just felt right to me, in my physical self. They were right for the movement of the…

— Matthew Zapruder

“One line lands in a word and one word lands in a line and there you have it the secret of poetry”

— Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence…

— Jean Cocteau

I'm very conscious of the fact that every line should have a cadence to it. It should contribute to the progress of the poem.…

— Billy Collins

The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt…

— William Shenstone

Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality,…

— Jason Reynolds

Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.

— Margaret Atwood