Quotes About Prose

The poetry of speech.

I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry.

I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.

To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.

Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.

Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.

The poetry of life must not be replaced with matter-of-fact prose.

Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.

I write, but I don't write poetry. I don't rhyme or anything like that.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.

Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose.

There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear.

The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.

I read a lot of prose poetry and get inspired by more-so just a state of mind.

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

All that is not prose passes for poetry.

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 their best order.