“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”

— Paul Valéry

Last update Sept. 27, 2023. History

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Paul Valéry 89

French poet, essayist, and philosopher 1871–1945

John Wain (1925–1994) British writer

Talk on BBC Radio, 13 January 1976
Quoted in "The Penguin Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Quotations", J M & M J Cohen (1996) p. 389 ISBN 0-14-051165-2

“Prose is walking; poetry is flying”

Galway Kinnell (1927–2014) Poet

“Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry.”

David Hare (1947) British writer

Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare Guesses at Truth (London: Macmillan, ([1827-48] 1867) p. 143.
Misattributed

“Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

The Critic as Artist (1891), Part I

“Poetry must be as well written as prose.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

Letter to Harriet Monroe (January 1915)

“By definition, if prose is a river, poetry is a fountain.”

Michael Longley (1939) poet

'Poetry Ireland Review' Summer 1999

“Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 275

“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”

Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) American politician, Governor of New York

The New Republic (4 April 1985)

“Prose — it might be speculated — is discourse; poetry ellipsis.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

"'Soul at the White Heat': The Romance of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry," (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988)
Context: Prose — it might be speculated — is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider’s delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

“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.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

12 July 1827
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”

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Paul Valéry 89

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