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Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending;
Many a poem is marred by a superfluous verse.
--
Elegiac Verse, st. 14 (1879)

 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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All stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending, and if they're any good, the ending is a beginning.

 

James Clavell

 

I have read a rondeau or rondel by Marzials in the Athenaeum beginning and ending "When I see you": it was very graceful and shewing an art and finish rare in English verse. This makes me the more astonished about Flop flop.

 

Theo Marzials

 

There neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified — more supremely noble than this very poem — this poem per se — this poem which is a poem and nothing more — this poem written solely for the poem's sake.

 

Edgar Allan Poe

 

He wrote down everything he saw and heard, and most of his thoghts, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose. It could take him many hours to write in his diary a survey of one full day: everything was an experience, any noteworthy observation which some nameless person might make was a new vista, any insignificant piece of information was a new sunrise, any ordinary poem he read for the first time was the beginning of a new epoch like a flight around the globe; the world was multiform, magnificent and opulent, and he loved it.

 

Halldor Laxness

 

I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.
I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length.

 

Edgar Allan Poe