Ear Quote by Thomas Lynch

I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.

— Carol Ann Duffy

There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness.

— Dana Goodyear

I don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions…

— Michael Longley

One of the deep fundamentals of poetry is the recurrence of sounds, syllables, words, phrases, lines, and stanzas. Repetition can be one of the…

— Edward Hirsch

Sometimes a poem appeals to me technically, just because of the way a line feels on my lips. Sometimes it is because it says…

— Frank Skinner

Sometimes I am puzzling over something for months and months and the poem gets created in small bursts and rewritten a hundred times, and…

— Sarah Kay

I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times…

— Billy Collins

I think my prose - mine and that of others - sometimes slips into a cadence or rhythm that can replicate or come close…

— Pattiann Rogers

Poetry is prose, bent out of shape.

— J. Patrick Lewis

There's always an added element of a poem when it's read aloud because then you can really hear the rhythm, and the cadence, and…

— Masiela Lusha

Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

— Carl Sandburg

The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given…

— George Oppen