A dance is a measured pace, as a verse is a measured speech.

-Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans
  The Advancement of Learning, bk.2, ch.16, section 5.

   Let simple Wordsworth chime his childish verse, And brother Coleridge lull the babe at nurse.

-Rochdale
  English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, l.917^18.

Dark Sappho! could not verse immortal save That beast imbued with such immortal fire? Could she not live who life eternal gave?

-Rochdale
^18  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 2, stanza 39.

Verse hath a middle nature: heaven keeps souls, The grave keeps bodies, verse the fame enrols.

-Donne,John
  'An  Anatomy of the World: The First  Anniversary'.

WhenTime shall turn those amber locks to grey, My verse again shall gild and make them gay.

-Drayton, Michael
  England's Heroic Epistles,'Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, to the Lady Geraldine'.

   And this unpolished rugged verse I chose As fittest for discourse and nearest prose.

-Dryden,John
  Religio Laici, l.453^4.

Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough, A flask of wine, a book of verseöand Thou Beside me singing in the wildernessö And wilderness is paradise enow.

-Fitzgerald, Edward
  The Ruba¤  iya¤  t of Omar Khayya¤  m of Naishapur, stanza12. In the1879 edn this was changed to'A Book of  Verses underneath the Bough, /  A  Jug of  Wine, a loaf of Breadöand Thou / Beside me singing in the Wildernessö / Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!'

   Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

-Frost, Robert Lee
   Address at Milton  Academy, Mass,17 May.

For there isanupstartcrow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.

-Greene, Robert
  Of Shakespeare. The Groatsworth of  Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance. Iohannes fac totum = 'Jack-of-all-trades'.

   Who says that fictions onlyand false hair Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty? Is all good structure in a winding stair?

-Herbert, George
'Jordan (1)', collected in The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (published posthumously,1633).

Where we such clusters had, As made us nobly wild, not mad; And yet each verse of thine Out-did the meat, out-did the frolic wine.

-Herrick, Robert
  'An Ode for [Ben  Jonson]'.

I can scarcely fancy myself to ask a superior to publish a volume of my verse and I own that humanly there is very little likelihood of that ever coming to pass. And to be sure if I chose to look at things on one side and not the other I could of course regret this bitterly. But there is more peace and it isthe holier lot to be unknown than to be known.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins
Letter to Richard Watson Dixon, 29 Oct. Collected in C C Abbott (ed)  The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon (1935).

Le vers est la forme optique de la pense¤  e.Voila'   pourquoi il convient surtout a'   la perspective sce¤  nique. Verse is the optical form of thought. That is the reason a scenic perspective suits it.

-Hugo,Victor Marie
  Cromwell, pre¤  face.

Past ruined Ilion Helen lives, Alcestis rises from the shades; Verse calls them forth; 'tis verse that gives Immortal youth to mortal maids.

-Landor,Walter Savage
  'To Ianthe'.

We hardly know any instance of the strength and weakness of humannaturesostriking, and sogrotesque, as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stockingöhalf Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison inone pocket, and a quire of bad verses in the other.

-1st Baron
  Of Frederick the Great. Historical Essays.'Frederic the Great', in the Edinburgh Magazine,  Apr.

   My celestial patroness, who deigns Her nightly visitation unimplored, And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires Easy my unpremeditated verse: Since first this subject for heroic song Pleased me long choosing, and beginning late.

-Milton,John
  Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.9, l.21^6.

   My verse represents a handle I can grasp in order not to yield to the centrifugal forces which are trying to throw me off the world.

-Nash, (Frederic) Ogden
Recalled on his death, 9 May1971.

Leave not a foot of verse, a foot of stone, A Page, a Grave, that they can call their own; But spread, my sons, your glory thin or thick, On passive paper, or on solid brick.

-Pope, Alexander
  The Dunciad, bk.4, l.127^30.

And no one knows, at first sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy. There's nothing in it.

-Pound, Ezra Loomis
 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,'MR NIXON'.

Still is thy name in high account, And still thy verse has charms, Sir David Lindesay of the Mount, Lord Lion King-at-arms!

-Scott, Sir Walter
  Marmion, canto 4, stanza 7.