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
“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”
“Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry.”
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.”
The Critic as Artist (1891), Part I
“Poetry must be as well written as prose.”
Letter to Harriet Monroe (January 1915)
“By definition, if prose is a river, poetry is a fountain.”
'Poetry Ireland Review' Summer 1999
“Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama.”
Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 275
“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”
The New Republic (4 April 1985)
“Prose — it might be speculated — is discourse; poetry ellipsis.”
"'Soul at the White Heat': The Romance of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry," (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988)<!-- E.P. Dutton -->
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.
12 July 1827
Table Talk (1821–1834)
