“Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact … the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.”

—  William Carlos Williams

Detail & Prosody for the Poem Patterson given to James Laughlin (1939), now at Houghton Library
General sources

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact … the spontaneous conformation o…" by William Carlos Williams?
William Carlos Williams photo
William Carlos Williams 83
American poet 1883–1963

Related quotes

“Prose uses the medium of language whilst poetry serves language and explores it.”

Michael Schmidt (poet) (1947) American poet

The Great Modern Poets, London, 2006

“Prose and poetry are different in construction. You can lie back and read prose, and you can read it fast. Poetry on the other hand, requires a different kind of attention and concentration … the effect it has on the ear and the imagination.”

Michael Schmidt (poet) (1947) American poet

The Great Modern Poets, London, 2006

Oscar Wilde photo

“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

David Hare photo

“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

Marshall McLuhan photo

“All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.”

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

quoted in McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed by W. Terrence Gordon, 2010, p. 167
1980s

Niels Bohr photo

“I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science.”

Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish physicist

Remarks after the Solvay Conference (1927)
Context: I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.

Audre Lorde photo

“Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Context: The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet-whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom.

Marianne Moore photo

“If you demand on the other hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

Poetry
Collected Poems (1951)

Gertrude Stein photo

“Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not. And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

"Poetry and Grammar"
Lectures in America (1935)

Related topics