Reading a poem aloud by someone who understands it, can be a crucial experience, but better yet is reading it aloud oneself.

I will be reading the poetry and I will read it aloud because I will be, you know, whispering the poetry, because poetry, I really believe, has to do with a sense of communicating and the idea of reading the poem, giving life to the poem, is important, and so the old tradition is very important.

Take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right.

The practice of reading aloud did do something towards attuning my ear .The subtle cadences of Elizabethan blank verse taught me more than the substantial study of English prosody could do at that time.

The more you understand a poem and its complexities and depth, the more you will be able to do when reading it aloud.

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

The proper act of reading of a poem was not an act of passive submission but one of collaboration with its author.

Reciting a poem aloud, you are not like an actor, rather you come to understand, then to be, the voice of the poem itself.

The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.

I mean to indicate the reading of poetry not merely for the sensual ear, but for the mind's ear as well; yet the mind's ear can be trained only by the other, and the matter, practically considered, comes inescapably back to the reading of poetry aloud.

When people hear stories, they identify more closely with the characters. When I read aloud, people always come up to me and say, “I understand it much better now that I’ve heard you read it. I can hear the characters’ voices much clearer…”

I do think that reading aloud, or performing one’s own work is very helpful to the writing process. You can hear the voices you are creating, see the scenes you’ve created, and where the text falters.