To Understand Vers Libre, One Must Abandon

Only Those Of Our Poets Who Kept Solidly To The Shakespearean Tradition Achieved Any Measure Of Success. But Keats Was The Last Great Exponent Of That Tradition, And We All Know How Thin, How Lacking In Charm, The Copies Of Keats Have Become.

To Understand Vers Libre, One Must Abandon All Desire To Find In It The Even Rhythm Of Metrical Feet. One Must Allow The Lines To Flow As They Will When Read Aloud By An Intelligent Reader.

Great Emotion Always Tends To Become Rhythmic, And Out Of That Tendency The Forms Of Art Have Been Evolved. Art Becomes Artificial Only When The Forms Take Precedence Over The Emotion.

Don’t Ask A Writer What He’s Working On. It’s Like Asking Someone With Cancer On The Progress Of His Disease.

Poets Are Always The Advance Guard Of Literature; The Advance Guard Of Life. It Is For This Reason That Their Recognition Comes So Slowly.