"The poet who writes 'free' verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry, and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor-- dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor."
W. H. Auden

"Actually, free verse is not a term that I myself care much for.. What you are talking about is that you are not writing a rhyming or a regular verse, but more of an open, organic form."
James Dickey

"There must not be any preconceived notion or design for what the poem ought to be... I'm not interested in writing sonnets, sestinas or anything... only poems. If the poem has got to be a sonnet (unlikely tho) or whatever, it'll cerrtainly let me know."
Amiri Baraka

"If by traditional forms we mean meters, stanzas, rhymes, that kind of thing, I don't think any of those has any meaning in itself or is absolutely essential to poetry."
Richard Wilbur