
“No aspect of a poem is more singular, more unique, than its rhythm.”
'The Sounds of Poetry' Farrar,Strauss & Giroux 1998
The Sounds of Poetry 1998
What is a Poem - Endword - Selected Poems (1926)
“No aspect of a poem is more singular, more unique, than its rhythm.”
'The Sounds of Poetry' Farrar,Strauss & Giroux 1998
The Sounds of Poetry 1998
“A certain ambiguity of rhythm is one of the beauties of a poem”
The Anatomy of Poetry, Marjoie Boulton, Routledge & Kegan, London 1953.
"Fear", pp. 31, Harper Row 1966
Native Son (1940)
“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.”
Paris Review interview (1996)
Context: In the long poem, if there is a single governing image at the center, then anything can fit around it, meanwhile allowing for a lot of fragmentation and discontinuity on the periphery. Short poems, for me, are coherences, single instances on the periphery of a nonspecified center. I revise short poems sometimes for years, whereas, since there is no getting lost in the long poem, I engage whatever comes up in the moment and link it with its moment.
“The poem, a harmonious flow of nuances, demands a musical rhythm, Vers libre.”
Contemporary French Poetry, The Poetry Review, 1914
Source: Cider with Rosie (1959), p. 280. (The last sentence of the book)
J. S. P. Tatlock The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950) p. 485.
Criticism