F. S. Flint

Frank Stuart Flint (December 19, 1885 – February 28, 1960) was an English poet and translator who was a prominent member of the Imagist group.

Quotes

Otherworld Cadences (1920)

• There is only one art of writing, and that is the art of poetry..whether it is in the form of prose or in rhyme and meter or in rhymed cadence.
• Prose will be used for the more objective branches of writing- novels, plays, essays..Cadence will be used for personal, emotional, lyrical utterances in which the phrasing goes with a stronger beat and the words live together with an intense flame.
• The history of English poetry in verse in the story of the exhaustion of the effects to be obtained from rhyme and meter of the exploitation of a mine in which the most lodes have at last given out.
• Swinburne gave the coup de grace to English rhyme.
• The natural cadence of our emotions are the driving force behind our poetic expressions.
• My three propositions to poetry are:
  • A)Poetry is a quality of the artistic expression independent of form.
  • B)Rhyme and metre are artificial and an external addition to poetry
  • C)Artistic form of the future is prose with cadence for lyrical expression

• My own unryhmed cadences , and those of other writers are a reversion to the real English tradition of Cynewulf.

• • Preface , 'Otherworld Cadences', Poetry Bookshop, London 1920

Other Quotes

• I have followed my ear and my heart, which may be false. I hope not.
  • Preface, In the Net of Stars, 1909

• Like most inventors, Pound did not create out of the void. The "Image" he took from T.E. Hulme's table talk. The "ism" was suggested to him by the notes on contemporary French poetry which I wrote for Harold Monro's Poetry Review. The collacation of 'image' and 'ism' came to Pound after I had told him about Divoire's essays on stratégie littéraire.
  • Verse Chronicle, article, The Criterion, 1932

Contemporary French Poetry, The Poetry Review, 1914

Translation from Robert de Souza Du Rythme en francais

• The poem, a harmonious flow of nuances, demands a musical rhythm, Vers libre.

• There is a natural physiological tendency to pronounce in one breath successive groups of rhythmic feet, and the rhythmic content in the average length of breathing can only be called a verse.

German Chronicle, Poetry & Drama, vol. II, 1914

German Chronicle, Poetry & Drama, vol. II, ed. Harold Munro Poetry Bookshop, London 1914

• The point is that any piece of Impressionism, whether it be prose, verse or painting, or sculpture, is the record of the impression.

• Every speech is at once a language serving the purposes of will, expressing intimate desires and commands, and at same time expressing thoughts by a sequence of concepts.