A Quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton
Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.
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Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open to accusations of elitism, mandarinism. Open form was like common ground on which all might graze their cattle - it was not to be closed in by usurping landlords.
The Democratic position seems to be everything is going to be free. Free education. Free health care. Free housing. Free love. Free kittens, I don't know.
Once I was a prisoner lost inside myself with the world surrounding me, wandering through the misery, but now I am free. Free to love, free to laugh, free to soar, free to shine, free to give.
If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.
If I can quote myself, I explained whatever it is I'm doing once for No Tell Motel, and I still think it's the clearest I've ever been about this: "I don't write free verse poems - mostly because I can't. But I am interested in the musical effects achievable with free verse."
It is not just shameful for a contemporary American poet to use rhymes, it is unthinkable. It seems banal to him; he fears banality worse than anything, and therefore, he uses free verse - though free verse is no guarantee against banality.
The concept of free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms.
The single aim of my life is that every child is:
free to be a child,
free to grow and develop,
free to eat, sleep, see daylight,
free to laugh and cry,
free to play,
free to learn, free to go to school, and above all, free to dream.
I think that in free societies, and we're constantly talking about living in free societies, aren't we, in contradiction with unhappy people who live in non-free societies, that the benefit, the dividend of living in a free society is that you say what you think.
Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to talk, think and act for myself — and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty.
We're not saying that everything should be free, it should be free and so on, we don't say that it doesn't have to be for free, it just has to be free in terms of freedom.
I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.
Free verse'? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'.
They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words - 'free-love' - as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.
Everyone asks for freedom for himself,
The man free love, the businessman free trade,
The writer and talker free speech and free press.
It seems to me that the term 'free will' is one of the most manipulated and exploited terms. The real explanation of free will is not that you have free will but that your will can eventually make you free, that will can liberate you, that will can release you from slavery.
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