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