A Quote by Derek Walcott

All of Victorian verse is pentameter. — © Derek Walcott
All of Victorian verse is pentameter.

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The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.
I adored being at the RSC and working on the verse and getting the iambic pentameter right. You just skim across the surface, and the speech is over before you know it. You can just ride along on the music of it.
The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.
Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.
Whatever you think The Uni-verse is withholding from you, YOU are withholding from The Uni-verse. If you think that The Uni-verse isn't answering your prayers, chances are you aren't listening to your intuition and following it. You are so scared that you ask for new intuition, but that's not how life works. The Uni-verse is constantly whispering to you, nudging you to trust It and take a leap. But if you don't take the leap of faith, then The Uni-verse can't open any more doors for you.
The first two books that I did by myself were long stories in verse. I knew I could do that because I'd written a lot in verse. But, verse stories are hard to sell, so my editor encouraged me to try writing in prose.
I used to be very fascinated by Victorian stuff, and my best known books, the Mortal Engines series, have a sort of retro, Victorian vibe, despite being set in the far future.
I used to be very fascinated by Victorian stuff, and my best-known books, the 'Mortal Engines' series, have a sort of retro, Victorian vibe, despite being set in the far future.
The Victorian house and lots of other buildings weren't oppressive in themselves. They were often very airy and gingerbready and fancy. But they were associated with all this [Victorian] stuffiness.
I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.
Sometimes I write from the end of the verse to the beginning of the verse.
My own verse is usually free verse. The freer the better.
One of my main problems with music is that the basic formula is always the same: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, chorus, chorus, end. One of the bands that changed that was The Beatles. If you listen to 'Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.' It's three verses, bridge, end.
I write a lot of children's verse and I think it delights in the language. It pleases people. It's very musical. It's very lyrical and that's certainly a very important aspect of poetry. But I think that a lot of it is verse. I write well-wrought verse.
I like all sorts of things, not necessarily just Victorian. Even though I tend to read a lot of Victorian novels, I like a lot of contemporary stuff.
I love the Victorian era, and I always have, but I had a leg up on the writing because I was familiar with a lot of the science from the Victorian era. And that led to a massive interest in the science of this time of history.
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