Prosody Quotes

“Rhythm must have meaning.”
― Ezra Pound

“In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them.”
― E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

“I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job”
― Seamus Heaney

“Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.”
― W. H. Auden

“We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

“A poem I may never complete / A prosody that may never have rhythm / A rhyming of broken syllables / A Gazal without her mention / Her incomplete gaze; in spite of my presence / My youth without her love is tainted fruit / The fruit that if eaten is committing sin / My soul is imprisoned in the custody of evil orchard / The orchard of despair instead.”
― Mirza Sharafat Hussain Beigh

“It demands desire of Zulykha
Loyalty of Angels
Vehemence of devils
And patience of Prophet
You may too need
God's mouth
To reveal rhyming letters”
― Mirza Sharafat Hussain Beigh