Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I like the way the prose and poetry interact.
Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.
Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.
We can write the new chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation.
Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.
The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.
Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.
In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught "creative writing." We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.