Couplets Quotes

They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.

There is the question of language. Although the play [Candid] is not written in strict verse form, there is an underlying beat of rhyming couplets, with echoes of Pope and the tradition of eighteenth-century philosophical verse.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

The essay I had to read was called, “An Essay on Criticism” by Alexander Pope. The first challenge was that the essay was, in fact, a very long poem in “heroic couplets”. If something is called an essay, it should be an essay.

I like ghosts. I like friends. I like couplets. I like the idea of a mission.

Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

It’s sour grapes, I admit, I want to be more famous so people are examining my work couplet by couplet, you know what I mean? That’s the level where I want to go.

Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that’s usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.

Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline – exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?.

The best revenge is the massive success.

I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now!”

I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original.

Very nice couplet, although there are dull stretches.

The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a – you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.

My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn’t be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number.

But there’s nothing that gives me more thrill than when I’m writing and a couplet works. I find the right rhyme, or it’s just perfect. There’s nothing that exciting.

I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.

For all the years I’d spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

I’m a compulsive enjamber. I’m drawn to half-meanings created by the line, so that’s definitely an element of craft that’s always on my mind. And I’m a big devotee of the short line, of couplets and tercets, and of irregular stanzas with lots of white space. I’ve got to give the dense language room to breathe!