“The basic line in any good verse is cadenced… building it around the natural breath structures of speech.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

Rothenberg and Antin interview (1958)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The basic line in any good verse is cadenced… building it around the natural breath structures of speech." by Kenneth Rexroth?

Kenneth Rexroth 65

American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientiou… 1905–1982

Related quotes

“Wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

To the Memory of Mr. Oldham, line 15.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“There is a natural physiological tendency to pronounce in one breath successive groups of rhythmic feet, and the rhythmic content in the average length of breathing can only be called a verse.”

F. S. Flint (1885–1960) English Imagist poet

Contemporary French Poetry, The Poetry Review, 1914

“Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance.”

Amy Lowell (1874–1925) US writer

Can Grande's Castle (1921), preface.

“Just breathe at the end of the line or on the punctuation. If you lose that, and lose the iambic pentameter, you'll lose all the sense of what you're saying. And if you do breathe, you'll find that Shakespeare's verse is like a surfboard.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Keith Baxter interviewed by Geoff Andrew for the British Film Institute (on the only piece of direction Welles ever gave him) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qON_f32HQDk

“Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter 8, p. 232

“I have tried to show these capabilites as continuous with our animal nature, connected with our basic structure of motives.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).
Context: Still, people have a lot of obvious and important things that other species do not–speech, rationality, culture and the rest. Comparison must deal with these. I have tried to discuss some of the most important of them, not attempting at all to deny their uniqueness, but merely to grasp how they occur in what is, after a primate species, not a brand of machine or a type of disembodied spirit. I have tried to show these capabilites as continuous with our animal nature, connected with our basic structure of motives.