Love first invented verse

 

 

 Love first invented verse, and form'd the rhime,

The motion measur'd, harmoniz'd the chime.

 

-- John Dryden 

The Procrustean bed of the needless bonds of rhyme

 Rhyme sure in needless bonds the poet ties,

Procrustus like, the ax or wheel applies,

To lop the mangled sense, or stretch it into size.

-- Edmund Smith (1672-1710)

We've gone from Bungle in the Jungle to simply unrepeatable in less than fifty years

Wit, as the chief of virtue's friends,

Disdains to serve ignoble ends:

Observe what loads of stupid rhimes

Oppress us in corrupted times.

 

-- Jonathan Swift

Your brains were a noddle before they were a noodle

Poor slaves in metre, dull and addle-pated,

Who rhyme below even David's psalms translated.

Thus far the poet; but his brains grow addle:

And all the rest is purely from this noddle.

-- John Dryden

Bret Stephens of The New York Times: "It was a revelation to me that you could be a sincere Christian and not be a peasant"

The former editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post, quoted here in 2003, is a secular Jew.

Rhymes with insular.

The torture of writer's block

 

 

 

 

 

Some strain in rhyme;

the muses on their racks

Scream, like the winding of ten thousand jacks.

-- Alexander Pope

The Restraint of "R"

 

 

 

Rhyme is a crutch that lifts the weak along,

Supports the feeble, but retards the strong.

-- Edmund Smith (1672-1710)